Disclaimer: This post is in no way intended as a rebuke of anyone in my life. I am blessed to be surrounded by caring, compassionate people and have no complaints about how my friends and family treat me when I am sick. But I do hope this post can help and encourage even those with the best “bedside manners” to feel more confident and comfortable when talking to someone who is sick.
If there is anything that having MS for 20 years has taught me, it’s that there is almost nothing that creates more awkwardness for people than when they have to deal with a loved one who has a chronic illness. For it is there that we come to the end of ourselves. It is there that we discover how “useless” we are, how unable we are to fix what is broken, and how insufficient words can be. In this post I hope to help my readers learn how to deal with friends and family who are dealing with chronic illness.
But having MS for twenty years has allowed/forced me to have quite a few “procedures,” some of them so awful that I wouldn’t care to put them in print. Through hours of sitting in doctors’ offices, waiting for phone calls about test results, and having awkward, frustrating, embarrassing, and sometimes excruciating tests performed, I now know the truth about myself. I am a machine.
