Single and Sick at 31

Lots of people get sick. Actually, most people get sick eventually, as the great majority of deaths are caused by some form of illness (the leading one being heart disease – not that I’m competitive). Some become ill way too early, without ever really having lived. Many become ill after seventy or eighty good years. Plenty of people get sick in their thirties and forties and fifties, many that are married and/or have children.

I’m willing to bet there are not many people that become ill as young, single adults – emphasis on single. While I have been glad not to burden a loved one with my needs and challenges on a constant basis, I do find unique difficulties in facing serious illness without a spouse or significant other. Even if living alone were never a problem (and thanks to friends and my moms’ visits, it hasn’t been much of one for me), facing the future as a single woman at 31 can be overwhelming.

Being single at 31 is daunting in its own rite to most healthy women. Some people get lonely. Those of us that want children are cringing as our biological clocks tick. We imagine the worst a single life has to offer. We are truly delighted to celebrate with our friends getting married and having babies, yet we grow more insecure with each announcement.

When you combine that with chronic illness and no real certainty for the future, the picture becomes more difficult to paint in a positive light. I try to embrace hope and positivity when considering the future for my body and my health, but it’s difficult to imagine meeting a guy that wants to jump on board. I’m not exactly “out there” meeting people due to my ongoing fatigue, and most men don’t seek out women with truckloads of baggage.

I’ve never been one to rue the single life or force fit relationships to avoid being alone, but I have always expected to one day meet the love of my life, get married, have children and live to become a grandmother. Maybe I watch too many movies, I don’t know. I guess I was more comfortable being single before I got sick, since I could plausibly imagine embarking on my Hollywood ending at any moment. I struggle more now, with the fear that I may never again be well. I might never recover the energy that has eluded me for eighteen months.

I just finished watching the movie “Love and Other Drugs” with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. It actually helped me imagine a rewrite to my Hollywood ending in a way that befits a girl with ongoing health challenges and an uncertain prognosis. Rest assured this is a very loose parallel since the movie is far more scandalous than my relatively boring life, but I was brightened a bit by the potential of a long-term relationship for a girl facing long-term illness.

A Year Lost, A Future Found

Every night for a year I have crashed. Again and again, I call my mom to tell her to come back to the hospital because something bad is happening and the nurses want to take me to the ICU. Each night, the nurses and doctors become more and more panicked when my blood pressure can’t be detected by any available apparatus. Over and over, I feel that most awful sensation of extreme heat and lack of oxygen, easily the worst feeling I can imagine. Each night, I reawake stark naked to the room full of doctors and nurses surrounding me perplexed, wondering what the hell is wrong with me. And every time, my mom and a nurse push my stretcher to the CCU at top speeds, while I proclaim over and over again that I’m going to die.

These are like nightmares, in that I seemingly have no control over their presence or outcomes, yet I am fully awake to experience them with total consciousness. This has been my year.

As the anniversary of my illness neared, I wasn’t sure how I would feel on October 19. I hoped I might be able to finally put those memories of crashing to rest – isn’t 365 nights enough? I thought I might feel some sense of accomplishment or closure. I feared I would more acutely feel the dread and terror that fill me every time I relive that awful first night in the hospital.

Mercifully, my hope seems to have come true. In the days since I passed that one-year milestone, I have been able to fall asleep without reliving my nightmare. While I still toss and turn for quite a while before getting to sleep, now it’s because my brain is filled with forward-looking thoughts like my return to work and exercise goals. I feel like an unspeakable burden has finally been lifted. I have not only survived a year marked by pain, heartache, fear and helplessness, but I have survived [and hopefully left behind] a year haunted by psychological ghosts.

While this past year was tough, I am so grateful that my illness fit neatly into just twelve months. So many others are painfully ill for years on end, never knowing when, or even if, they will feel better. While it is true that my illness is not really cured, only held at bay by modern medicine, the potential for what I can now achieve is truly limitless. It is with this in mind that I can now close my eyes and see a real future.

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It’s been a while since I provided a status update, so here it is: Life is good. I have been doing 57 minutes (with breaks!) of cardio exercise at rehab for a few weeks now. In addition to going to rehab three times a week, I exercise on my own two days. I am resuming work part-time on Monday and return to full-time work on November 15. I now have biopsies just once every four weeks. I am almost off of the steroid, Prednisone. I am getting accustomed to my heart-healthy and diabetes-friendly diet. My biggest complaint is frequent headaches – a long way from the debilitating nausea and pain from a few months ago!