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If I tell you I am sick, do you believe me.  If I tell you I have Rheumatoid Arthritis will you understand me. If I tell you I will always suffer with this disease are you with me and if I tell you I am chronic will you be with me!!  RA the disease with so many questions and very few answers but it is chronic.

We have suffered and we have lost.  We still suffer and we still lose but this is how it is when you’re dealing daily with what’s known as a chronic condition.  Something that affects your every day life and it doesn’t matter if you are okay or if you are having one of your worse times ever.  The fact is, it’s always there reminding you of what life is like with it.  Yet how many really understand what it’s like having a chronic disease.  It brings about questions that may or may not be answered in a way that will help us in our future battle with what we will come to learn is our fight for life with what we know is chronic.

Chronic for us means how we tell you we feel when we’re asked and that answer doesn’t seemed to have changed much because how we feel hasn’t changed much.  It means that tired and confused look on our face may still be the same because we’re just as worn out as we have been and always seem to be.  You see chronic does not only affect our bodies and minds, it affects our love ones with the challenges we face together.  The struggle to hold family together with a chronic condition is as tough as any situation can get because working so hard to keep family together through this time is chronic.  It is work that has to be done over and over again and just like with this disease, it may or may not work this time.  Your family just may not be able to stay for the long hall.

Guilt becomes chronic.  The guilty feelings of losing yourself to a disease that bounds you the way that Rheumatoid Arthritis does leaves hope slowly seeping away.  You have already watched your body being taken away yet that is not enough for this disease, it comes back for what it has left behind so your guilt for all of what is happening takes control of what is left of you.  It is also a constantly there making your mind weaker day by day.

Pity, no, this isn’t pity this is our truth.  We watch as our chronic disease stops us from being who we are physically and mentally as it takes away our abilities while waiting patiently for our minds that it knows will follow.  The emotional pain and sadness caused by the physical pain and disabilities that others may or may not see is so real and we without a doubt live it each and every day.  This is what our chronic disease has put upon us, this is how we have become chronic to our chronic disease.

Yes, we are chronic.  Chronic in our aches and pains, chronic in our highs and lows, chronic in our sadness, our guilt, out disabilities and our hopes for a better life.  So if we say to you we are chronic, yes we are.  In some ways we have to be chronic in order to survive because we are chronically fighting trying to save ourselves from all that we go through as we suffer through this disease.  You see either way, this is a never-ending battle.  We have so much in our lives that is persistent , constant, recurring and some difficult to eradicate while others are life lasting.  This is what Rheumatoid Arthritis has brought into our lives and to those in our lives, a life of being Chronic.

Be Blessed.