What is meant by ‘health anxiety’? A sudden or unexpected health event can change your life in many ways. Feelings of shock, anger, grief, loss and sadness can be commonplace. And while these feelings usually pass with time, if they cause ongoing stress, you may be at greater risk of developing depression and anxiety. Health anxiety is an anxiety condition that is often housed within the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) spectrum…
depression
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Life Lately | The Revolving Door of Feelings
“It’s a shame. It’s awful being a grown up. But the carousel never stops turning. You can’t get off.” Hands up, who else feels like this? I definitely feel this a lot of late. I thought it was just a chronic illness problem; that my life was beginning to be more and more dictated by my illness more than the other way around. With chronic illness, you feel…
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Life Lately | Pushing Through
I like to think that life throws you only what you can handle. That we get given things that will test us but will not break us. Sure, they push us to breaking point but we never break. I’ve dealt with a lot of things in the last six years, especially in the months following surgery. I like to believe that those months in post op recovery is where…
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The Highs and Lows of Hospital Stays
I’ve just spent a week in hospital, unexpectedly. Now I am no stranger to prolonged spells in a hospital bed. But this time, this was different. New city, new hospital, new problems. I am still processing all the new information so bear with me, this isn’t going to be all about what has gone on but more about what its like to spend time in hospital when youre chronically and…
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Life Lately | The Guilt, Oh The Guilt
Disclaimer: This post is not happy and positive. Sorry, not sorry. Anyone who follows me, or reads this blog will realise there has been a little bit of a lull in my posting. And somehow feel like there is an explanation due as to why. There are good and bad reasons to why I’ve been unusually quiet in my sharing of my experiences of living with chronic illness. And they may…
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Changing Attitudes
13.06.16 I stared down at the box of tablets in some sort of disbelief. How did it get to this, needing to take anti depressants? It’s week five of my post op recovery. I had surgery in mid- May on my bowel and to remove a cyst on my ovary. Things were going well; I was healing from my incisions and I was getting back to a normal diet. Then…
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Painkiller Addiction – My Other Recovery
Despite being chronically ill for the past four years, I’ve never thought of myself as needing painkillers to get through the bad days. Not that my bad days weren’t bad, I was just able to manage my pain. But surgery changed all that. I had planned IBD surgery on my bowel in May 2016 and the one thing I was terrified was the pain I was going to go through. I knew…
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When Will My Life Begin?
Last week, I had seberal rough days when I was full of self doubt and getting utterly frustrated with many aspects of my life. I wasn’t going to share how upset and angry I had been feeling but I thought, no, I am not going to deny myself this part of recovering and having a chronic illness. Here is the note I wrote to myself in the depths of feeling…
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Life Lately | The Challenge
I usually don’t get into this whole ‘giving something up for Lent’ thing. I’ve never been particularly religious or felt the need to give something up to prove something either. But I can see the logic behind it; trying to do something new for 40 days and see if it sticks. And this year, I think I might just be in need of this. Of course, things for me have…