.
My own immune system is
eating me alive and I'm somehow proud of it.
Now even though I can give the veneer of embracing life, subconsciously I'm
apparently killing myself. I don't know how
to stop it, I can just feel the cellular destruction taking place. And even if I had health insurance there’s a
good chance I wouldn't beat this disease.
The only medication they have for things like lupus are steroids and
antibiotics, both of which create side effects after a while that can be worse
than the original symptom. My goal is to
just keep alive in spite of my immune system attacking me, over the months I’m watching
things happen like my eyebrows falling off, swelling of infection all over me in
unexpected places, running sores that appear for no apparent reason.
Pain, lately it's leg pain. I'm thinking auto immune disease is subconscious
suicide, I'm watching the only part of me I wasn’t able to keep from going
crazy go crazy.
I've had this condition a
long time, maybe all my life.
I used to be so proud of my
overactive immune system.
A measles epidemic swept
through our Pasadena California school district, when I was around nine years
old. I ended up being the only kid in
class or one of a very few kids who didn't have the measles. Everyone got a few days off for measles
except me. I even went to a friend’s
house, snuck into her room, and drank from the water glass next to her bed where
she was lying going through her case of measles. Then went home and didn't feel any sickness
at all. Everybody got to have days off from
school for measles except me. I had to
keep going to school, while they all stayed home eating pudding and watching
the newly emerging daytime TV shows.
Later in life the amped
immune system got me through tough times.
Often a flu epidemic would fly through America in the eighties,
nineties, I never got affected. Watched
other people puke and exude from other places, it never got to me. Once I had the flu, in 2001 or so, one
time. It lasted a few days, nothing
remarkable. Other than that I've just
ridden through all the flu epidemics without getting sick since flu epidemics started
back in the 1960s? Since I started
paying attention, anyway.
So now at age 64 plus I find myself
with an immune system that still works overtime. These chronic infections I have, I can feel
the old girl battling it out inside. That's
where that pride comes in, the way I see my own body still at my age continuing
to work so hard to fight the infections that are resulting from the insane part
of the body, the lupus or whatever, the autoimmune mystery complex, a condition
god knows how long I've had.
So. I have no health insurance and can’t take time
off work to make my way through the maze of jammed clinics for those without health
insurance where I live. I know pretty much
what I have from reading the internet and that research also shows there isn't really
a good treatment for it, except rest and treating yourself really good, and trying
to slow down the progress.
I wouldn't be surprised though
if some day they find out that auto immune diseases are subconscious
suicide. Suicide for the naturalist who
can’t disrupt the Tao, the flow of life, by taking my own life, no matter how miserable
I am. . . .
******************
Story continues here:
I was around nine years old. I ended up being the only kid in class or one of a very few kids who didn't have the measles.
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