Well after some indescribably wonderful responses to yesterday’s blog post I’ve decided to share a little more. To explain a little more. To hopefully enlighten those around me a little more about what I go through. To be fair I cannot complain if I’m not willing to try and help people to understand.

A normal day in my house starts off like this.. I wake up to my gorgeous daughter coming and waking me up. That’s the best bit of my day! Her little face is the motivator to drag my sick sorry self out of bed. But not before I pull her into the bed for cuddles of course.
But once she has enough its “Get UP MAMA!!!!” Try explaining to a three year old that you can’t quite get going as fast as she can because your sick. I don’t want her to be told “mama can’t baby,because she is sick, or slow down baby mama can’t go that fast” I don’t want her reality to be that her mother is sick and can’t do what “normal” mothers do. I don’t want her to grow up with a fear of her mama being sick.
She gets up and races off into the kitchen with our two dogs and our kitten to explore the fridge for whatever strange thing she has decided she wants for breakfast today. I however am sitting on the side of the bed calling out directions like “careful baby don’t touch that” or mamas coming just a sec” because I can’t jump up out of bed to chase her. It’s not because I don’t want to or because I want five more minutes sleep. I actually can’t!
My body won’t  let me, this is a newish development which is making life with a three year old HARD! When I sit up my hips and back ache like I’ve slept on a pile of bricks, my knees almost can’t bend so you can imagine trying to stand!! When I finally get to standing, my ankles and toes ache like they are broken, and don’t forget my hips and hands and shoulders, they are all stiff too!
Then I hobble and I mean hobble out to the kitchen as I can’t really walk properly for about an hour after waking, it takes that long to loosen up. I go about my morning, I make baby’s breakfast, I make coffee and I hobble to the couch where I sit flexing my sore legs till they start to loosen up and feel strong enough to stand on I get up and start my day. This takes about an hour.
About two hours after waking the exhaustion starts to take its toll, I may have had nine or ten hours sleep but it won’t be enough, its NEVER enough! I feel so tired at this point that the slightest thing gets to me. I drop something and have to bend to pick it up and I start to cry because the effort to do that is so tiring I want to go and lay down.  On a good day I can, on a good day Miss 3 is at Kindy and I’m home and can sleep if I need to or on an extra good day my partner is home and he can take care of her while I go back to bed for a while.
But most days it isn’t like that most days since before my daughter was born its a case of keep going because  if you stop you won’t start again. It’s a non stop day till she finally crashes after twelve to thirteen hours of near constant activity. In which I’ve not only done my job as a Mum, I may have also in that day gone to work, cleaned the house at least twice, I’ve made three meals two snacks and plenty of drinks. I’ve washed clothes and made beds, I’ve done food shopping and entertained a three year old. I’ve done all of that while I’ve felt like I am crushed under the weight of sickness.
The best way I can describe it is like what a normal person feels like when they have the flu. Except that’s how I feel every day! You can imagine how hard it is when I get the flu! Which thanks to having no immune system I get for months one end with no breaks. I was so sick last winter I spent three months so sick I should have been in bed. But as any mother knows that’s just not possible when you have a child.
By the time she is in bed I am so sore even sitting down hurts. My whole body aches from head to toe and I’m so tired I have difficulty breathing. My knees are so sore the pain radiates up and down my legs and my back is so sore I can’t sit or lay down without pain. I try to snatch a few quiet hours in which I do as little as possible. This is my “rest” time. I inevitably fall asleep as the moment I stop moving I’m so tired I pass out.
Then I wake up and so begins another day. Another day of exhaustion. Another day of pain, another day of missing out on being healthy, another day where I am constantly reminded that I’m not like everyone else. At thirty one I am old! I am sick! And it won’t get better, only worse. There is no miracle cure for what I have. No magic pill that makes it better.
There is only ways to manage it. And even the medicine that manages it doesn’t keep the symptoms at bay it merely stops it from getting worse. It doesn’t take away the pain or the exhaustion. It doesn’t perk me up and make me feel good. It just stops my body from making more antibodies that are attacking my thyroid.
That’s what Hashimotos is. It started out that my thyroid glad was under active. Then in an effort to fix itself my body makes antibodies, but instead of helping,the antibodies attack the thyroid and are effectively killing it. So what was once not working well is now trying to kill itself. The medicine try’s to stop that from happening. It doesn’t fix me though, it doesn’t make me feel better it just stops the rot so to speak.
I’m not writing this to complain or to make people feel sorry for me. I’m writing this to help people understand what I go through every single day. I’m medicated and its this bad. This is as good as its going to get. It’s a struggle every single waking minute of every day.
People who live with this debilitating disease feel sick all the time! They feel tired and overwhelmed every day. They feel pain that never stops. They suffer mostly in silence because people don’t understand. They don’t know how hard it is. So I’m trying to explain it. No I don’t have cancer, I don’t have aids. But I do have a disease that will never get better. I have a disease that makes every day activities that most people take for granted really difficult for me. I have a disease that makes it difficult to fall pregnant, that makes it difficult to breast feed, it makes it hard to carry a baby to term. It makes it hard to breathe, it makes it hard to exercise. It makes it hard to do the simplest things. Some days it makes it hard to live. It makes it hard to function.
Do I wish I could change it ..YES! Do I wish it wasn’t me… Yes! Do I wonder why me…yes! I wonder all those things and more. So next time you ask how I am wait for the answer because when I say I’m ok, I don’t mean I’m great I really mean I’m ok. Just ok. Because I won’t tell you everyday how I really am because I don’t have the energy to keep explaining it. So read between the lines because even on a good day I’m far from good and a good way from being great.