Is a little compassion too much to ask for?

 It is so difficult to adjust to a new normal after a diagnosis. After many years of wondering why I had all over pain and tiredness, I finally got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

I was relieved that I had a name to put to the painful syndrome that sucked the life out of me and added to my woes as a sufferer of angina, arthritis and back pain. And polymyalgia rheumatica thrown into the mix.

It made sense that with all these ailments, I would be finding it more difficult, or even impossible to do the chores that after a lifetime of being a wife and mother, were familiar and regular as the rising and setting of the sun.

With the newest diagnosis, came a depression because not only was I totally frustrated with having to constantly adjust to my new normal, but I was not afforded much compassion or understanding from others.

It was intimated, but not said, that I was lazy and using ill health as an excuse to be lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was laid low emotionally as well as physically.

These days, it is rare to find someone who is compassionate for the chronically ill and/or aged. And it compounds the frustration and anger one can feel as one goes through the cycles of grief with a new diagnosis that limits one further.

I know a little understanding from others would go a long way to help me adjust and accept it every time I am faced with a new normal. 

Sadly, not only do most people now not want to listen about chronic illness, but they don't want to know. 

It's not a hard thing to commiserate with the trampled flower bowing under the weight of pain and illness and later, stigma. 

We don't necessarily ask for help from others, but is a little compassion too much to ask for? 

Grieve and move on!

When confronted with the diagnosis of a chronic health condition like fibromyalgia, we can often grieve for the stronger, healthier person we were before it and it's like any other form of grief. 

We are angry, we bargain, we accept it, we move on. The hardest part in moving on is linked with acceptance: we have to find our new normal. 

I find there's a period of anger and denial, then acceptance. And it varies with each of us.  

Acceptance is the pathway to moving forward. So it is critical that we come to acceptance by focussing on what we have left, rather than what chronic illness has taken away from us.

As in all grieving, no one can say how long it will take us to come to acceptance, but it must come so that we can find our new normal and live our new life in that new normal.

What chronic illness takes from us is more than the physical. But even so, despite feeling down emotionally, we should and must focus on what it hasn't taken.

I have days where I still mourn the loss of basic abilities like home cleaning, showering and walking far. Today is one of pain with fibromyalgia to the point that I can't straighten my fingers and even my eyes ache.. 

My to do list today is not big, but it. is. what. it. is.

• Clean the kitchen
• Cook dinner
• Shower sometime before bed