A year ago, in October, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.
No, not the kind you get from cracking your knuckles, or texting too much, but the kind where your immune system decides to attack your joints instead of the things that are actually trying to kill you.
I was 20.
Facing a chronic illness, one that will bring consistent stiffness and increased pain, is a lot to handle, to say the least.
Not to mention a reliance on a cocktail of eight pills a day just to be able to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom.
Instead of facing it, I decided to run.
I didn’t tell many people and decided to keep it more of a hidden aspect of my life.
I hid my limping and blamed it on a stubbed toe or twisted ankle.
I hid the pills from sight, sometimes skipping them, and then later regretting I did.
I continued to drink; I drank too much. I felt no pain, I felt nothing when I drank, and feeling nothing was a whole lot better than feeling everything.
I threw up. I got sick. My body started failing me.
I pushed on. I continued to go to class, I put on my makeup and my cute baggy sweaters that covered how swollen my limbs were underneath.
I exhausted myself with the work load. I crashed every night.
I broke up with my long-term boyfriend and kicked him out of my house. I didn’t want anyone close . . . I wanted to push them all away.
The act became a lot to handle, and the running away began to take its toll.
I retreated. I closed my bedroom door.
I ignored my roommates and my friends. I spent countless hours held up in my room watching reruns of Friends and avoiding the phone when it rang.
I would stare at it ringing, wondering, “Who have I let down today? Who did I forget to cancel on?” until the ringing would stop.
I stopped wearing makeup and I stopped going to class.
When asked, I would easily brush it off with a case of the third-year blues, or better yet, a cold I just couldn’t shake.
I looked to every other avenue of issues in my life and began to pick them apart. I looked to everyone else as having an issue instead of reaching out about mine.
I met a new man on one of my many drunken nights out, and I thought he was really great.
In an effort to keep him away from the madness that was slowly becoming my life, I pushed him away.
I set him up on dates with my friends, while I self-destructively flirted with him just the same.
I cried to him when my last relationship ended and crawled into bed with him to fill my void of emptiness.
And then it happened. I let him get close. I took off the sweater, and he saw my swollen joints. I opened the cupboard, and he saw my bottles of pills.
I let him see the tears that come along with the pain and stiffness.
I let him hold me while I completely forgot about the walls I had so neatly put up, and they began to crash down around me.
A year ago, in October, I sat in a specialist’s office, waiting for a life sentence that was about to be handed down, knowing that with those couple of words and blood tests, the way I lived would never be the same.
I clung to the idea that not saying something meant it didn’t exist and avoiding something meant I didn’t have to deal with it.
The progress doesn’t come without set backs. In fact, nothing ever does. As I sat back in my specialist’s office eight months later, I realized this fact.
He felt my joint, checked my flexibility and gave me another shot, another prescription to try to fight a battle against myself, against my immune system.
I curled up on the couch and lost myself in another TLC marathon. I said yes to the dress and brought on the hoarders but couldn’t admit I needed help.
I limped to the kitchen. It took 10 minutes, and I limped back just the same.
It hurt to sit still when my mind was a mess, and it hurt to admit I was wrong.
That disease I’ve been running from for almost a year is finally catching up.
I am 21.
