WEGO Health : Share with readers about a time you had to overcome a daunting challenge. What words of encouragement would you share with others who find themselves facing similar difficulty?
A daunting challenge is dealing with inflammatory bowel disease. It’s a disease that at times it feels like it takes everything away from you. It feels like it’s ruining your life. It feels like it runs your life. There are times where you are at the mercy of your bowels. They don’t care that you’re two feet away from a toilet when you begin to lose control of them and manage to shit yourself. There are times your so exhausted it’s all you can do to get through work. There’s times your in so much pain that you just want to scream your lungs out.
Medications fail. Friends leave. Doctors change. New symptoms pop up. New autoimmune diseases make their presence known. But you somehow keep going. You find reserves of strength and perseverance that you didn’t know you possessed.
Some days you wonder how you managed to keep going through those bad times..You worry about having to deal with the hard symptoms again. You wonder, are you strong enough to go through it again? Will you survive? Will you be the same person or will your disease make you even more jaded then you already are?
How do you keep going? You hold onto the good days. The days you get to ride your motorcycle up a mountain pass. The days you get to walk your dogs and not be exhausted at the end of it. You keep fighting because you don’t want your disease to own you. You keep fighting because you want to give it your all. That you tried everything.
And when it all becomes too much, I remember a quote from Grey’s Anatomy. And do my best to live by it.
There comes a point where it all becomes too much. When we get too tired to fight anymore. So we give up. That’s when the real work begins. To find hope where there seems to be absolutely none at all.
–Grey’s Anatomy