The Gilmore Book Club

How To Overcome Anything To Achieve Your Dreams

 Pain. That’s the first thing I was aware of when I opened my eyes. Being awake meant being in pain, inescapable, overwhelming, excruciating pain.

It had started with a small soreness in my leg, similar to one you feel after sleeping on something wrong. More of an annoyance than a pain really, but it didn’t go away. Instead, it grew, gaining in strength and severity, slowly beginning to seize other parts of my body, until it had conquered every single cell and affected the whole of my being. I was fifteen.

The truth is that this had all happened a few years before in the eighth grade. For a few months, I was completely overwhelmed by pain and fatigue, but I always begin this story in high school, because those few months in middle school were so unbearable, that my mind has protected itself by blocking out that short period of anguish. But after a few months, I felt better, like myself again, and life continued on as it always had.

When I least suspected it, the pain crept back, so slowly at first that it could almost be ignored, but then its persistence was too much and we started the doctors’ visits. What should have brought us answers only brought us more questions. Our family doctor started out with diagnosis like Lupus and Crohn’s disease, but blood tests and incompatible symptoms ruled those out. They drew vial after vial of blood, but test results were never conclusive. So, I had x-rays and CAT scans done. Those too revealed nothing.

Soon we were visiting every doctor- from Rheumatologists to ENTs and Ophthalmologists, even chiropractors- anyone who could assess what was wrong with me or help with the pain. For a while, I was diagnosed with having Wegner’s. If you’ve never heard of that, I don’t blame you, we hadn’t either. But eventually, that diagnosis changed into Rheumatoid Arthritis, and today, it’s Fibromyalgia. But what you call it doesn’t really matter, at least, not to me. What matters is what it did to me and how it changed my life forever.

Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is everything that society claims a lady should be: married, a mother, and so engrossed in those two roles that the true self begins to fade away. She strolls along the beachfront, attends society gatherings, and spends time with her husband and children. But all that seems like an act to Edna, a role she must play, but this is the role that others have seen her in for years, so there is a certain belief- even to Edna- that it must be true, that it must be everything. A feeling of dissatisfaction and disdain for her life begin creeping into Edna’s heart. This life, this wife, this mother- this is not the true Edna.  As Edna begins to examine her life, she begins to wonder if there might be a way out of this endless abyss in which she currently exists.

During the worst years, all I knew was pain. I’d wake up at 4am just to take my medication, so that it had a few hours to take effect by the time actually had to wake up for school. And as soon as the alarm went off, there was unimaginable pain searing throughout my body. It was excruciating to breathe or simply open my eyes.

I’d have to slump into an upright position, then bounce a few times on the edge of my bed so that the motion would help propel me up. It may seem a bit silly as I describe it, but my legs were not strong enough to lift me from the bedside on their own. Buttoning my jeans was an enormous struggle, and not because they didn’t fit, but because my fingers were too weak and too swollen to push the metal button through the denim loop. I remember looking down at my hands and scrutinizing them as if they had been switched with someone else’s while I slept, because these rigid, swollen, fragile hands were not mine. How could they be? My hands played piano and violin, and dribbled basket balls, and danced, and wrote stories for hours. No, these hands did not belong to me; they were the hands of the new person I had become, of someone I no longer recognized.  

All I wanted was to close my eyes and drift off into sleep because that was the only time I was ever not in pain. The exhaustion is overwhelming. It’s as if your bones were made of lead, your muscles encased in tar, your blood replaced with sand, and your body wrapped in chains long than those of the ghost of Jacob Marley. And gravity attaches itself to all these weights, pulling and dragging you down until you feel so heavy you might fall straight through the floor and down to the center of the earth. But there is someone else to contend with: someone choking your muscles and then attacking them with taser guns, someone gnawing and clawing at your joints, someone repeatedly hammering your bones with mallets and pick-axes until your entire being reverberates with a throbbing soreness and seizures of pain. And your body so fragile from the constant abuse that it’s only your paper-thin skin that keeps it all together, and is just one touch of a fingerprint away from shattering and completely falling apart.

But there were essays on The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath to write, and verbs to conjugate in Spanish, and dates of important historical battles to memorize. I had always been a good student, smart but also very hardworking, and not being able to keep up my grades just wasn’t an option. Being anything less than what I knew myself to be wasn’t an option. But, of course, all I felt like was less- less of a person. Each day, I woke up, went to school, came home. I spent the afternoon and evenings incapacitated on the couch or in my bed, struggling just to finish my homework before the weariness completely took over. Bed. School. Bed. It seemed like an endless loop of impossible mountains to climb.

Each minute seemed like an eternity; every second a test of my strength and fortitude in the face of torture. The world I knew, the life I knew, the person I knew myself to be- all of that was gone now. This inferno of agony and torment was unrelenting, and nothing seemed to quench the flames.

It is said that there are five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Denial was certainly the first demon to visit me during the worst of my sickness, shortly followed by anger, for I was unknowingly grieving for the life I use to live and the person I used to be. Elements of bargaining and sadness did sneak their way into my mind, but the final stage seemed to come all too quickly for me. Acceptance: the stage that’s usually the goal, if such a thing could be called a goal, the one the one thing that should help you move on, wasn’t everything it seemed to be. I was trapped in the rings of grief, but what if acceptance was not the Virgil to ensure my safe passage through this trial but the demon to trap me in a soul-less life? What if accepting my fate was my doom?

Continue to Part 2

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