Posts tagged ‘Anxiety’
Living in the in between
For me, the worst part of being the caregiver of someone with a chronic illness and also a patient myself is living in the “in between”- the grey area straddling the line of good and bad, healthy and sick. I am a bit of a control freak (I know, shocking) and get very agitated when I can’t anticipate what’s to come and can’t adequately plan for the future. Ask anyone who knows me- I am the captain of to do lists (and if they aren’t written neatly enough, I’ve been known to rewrite them) and timelines. Professionally, this makes me great at my job because I am always on top of my work and I can multitask incredibly well. But personally, it is a huge source of angst.
2013: Year in Review
Happy New Year’s Eve everyone!
This past year has been an exciting one for Dan and I, both online and offline. In the past year, Caring for Crohn’s & UC expanded incredibly- while I wrote far fewer posts than last year, the blog received over 19,000 views and gained This year, Caring for Crohn’s & UC exploded beyond my wildest dreams, having over 19,000 views by over 10,000 visitors, and gained 45 WordPress followers, 9 Tumblr followers, 131 Facebook fans and 213 Twitter followers. (Disclaimer: I am a huge analytics nerd, so please forgive me for being so excited over these numbers :-)) Thank you all SO much for your continued readership and support- while I haven’t kept up with posting as frequently as I want to, I am so happy that the content I wrote over the past two years has reached so many of you. It’s all in the name of raising awareness and educating others about inflammatory bowel diseases.
Enough about the numbers- here are some of my 2013 highlights.
Anxiety is My Invisible Illness
There have been so many great blog posts for Invisible Illness Week about inflammatory bowel disease that I didn’t have anything else to add! So I decided to go another route and let you all know about who I am and my invisible illness.
There are days where I feel like I am completely losing my mind, where I am so overcome by negative thoughts and desperate for some relief that I wished someone would hospitalize me. Days where the thought of eating, going outside or even talking to my husband make me want to crawl into a cave and hibernate. Days where I am so on edge that I snap at people who I love and people I don’t even know.
Many people don’t recognize that I am “sick” because they can’t see it. My sickness is on the inside, masked by years of practice of concealing any physical evidence of the illness, thus rendering it invisible. But just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean its not there.
The Diagnostics and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders classifies what I suffer from as code 300.02- Generalized Anxiety.
I’ve been living with generalized anxiety and panic attacks for most of my life. I was always an anxious child – the one who clung to the fence in the schoolyard in first grade screaming about not wanting my parents to leave me alone at school. I was the child who would come home from sleepovers at 11 p.m. because of overwhelming anxiety about being away from their parents, even if it was just down the road. I was the teenager who tried to go to sleep away camp on three separate occasions but called home every day in hysterics (I was never allowed to come home early though). I was the teenager who, after the suicide of her friend, was so overcome with grief and anxiety that going to school became too much to handle.
I was 16 years old when I was formally diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. According to the National Institute of Mental Health,
“people with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) are extremely worried about these and many other things, even when there is little or no reason to worry about them. They are very anxious about just getting through the day. They think things will always go badly.”
That’s one way of putting it.
IBD & Depression
If you have IBD, you know how taxing it can be, not only physically but also emotionally. It’s no surprise given the symptoms IBDers live with on a daily basis- painful cramps, diarrhea, weight loss, loss of appetite, and nausea. Living with these can wear you down and eventually, you might find that you have fallen into a bout of depression.
According to the World Federation for Mental Health,
“Quite often, physical and mental health disorders go hand in hand. Research shows that persons with severe or chronic physical illnesses often have a co-existing mental health problem.”
Caring for Crohn's & UC 