I’ve written many different blog posts over the last few months, but none of them felt like a finished product. As much as I wanted to share the events of the past few years with you, I’ve realized that I’m not ready to do that when I’m still processing it all myself. In the last two years, my world was flipped upside down and I’m still learning how to cope with that. It feels crazy to say that it has been two years since all of this has happened because to me it feels like yesterday. It has been two years since I was diagnosed with an obstructed kidney and one year since I had major surgery to fix the obstruction, yet every day I continue to deal with the physical and emotional repercussions of the initial diagnosis in August 2017.
I can’t help but reiterate the fact that this was the first time I felt my birth defect affected my day-to-day life. When you are born with a chronic illness you grow up with that as your normal, so you don’t really know any different. To this day, I still don’t really understand the magnitude of having to catheterize myself every three hours or having to do a nightly flush of my GI tract. I still don’t understand when people tell me I’m “strong” for living the life I live, especially now when recently I’ve felt more defeated and helpless than ever before.
Although this journey has brought many negative emotions with it, I can’t help but feel grateful for these experiences. I learned more about myself and this crazy life I live in the last two years than I did in my previous 20 years of living with my chronic illness. I now know the overwhelming feelings of fear and helplessness that so many people who lived with this before me have described. I learned that in those moments, I tend to shut off my emotions and put on a brave face, or I express those emotions instead in anger towards the people who are just trying to help make things easier for me — because I’d rather them think that I’m angry or frustrated with them than have them see how much pain I’m truly in. I also learned that in keeping those emotions bottled up, I made it a lot harder for myself to heal once the storm passed.
Learning to heal emotionally has been one of my toughest tasks but it has also been a beautiful experience for me. I lost sight of my hopes and dreams and felt like a prisoner in my own body, but today I am proud to say that I came out of this fight with a reenergized hope to make my dreams a reality and a passion to share my story with all of you. I’m still learning how to live with my new “normal,” but I’m ready to embrace it rather than let it bring me down. So from this point on, I’m going to post more often (I really mean it this time), both about my good days and the bad ones. I’m going to post about pursuing a career in medicine and all the times I’ve felt like I failed. I’m going to post about living at home as a 22-year-old post-grad and how frustrating it can be at times (sorry Mom and Dad). And I’m going to post about all the things I learn as I continue living with this chronic illness that I’m bound to for life.
“I may never be healed; but each day, I am healing.”
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself
five seconds of fearlessness 