By: Isabela Hernandez
Having a chronic condition isn’t easy. It’s something that needs constant upkeep, monitoring, and attentiveness. For me, a sometimes lazy 22-year-old college student, keeping up with my care is at times the last thing I want to do. I’ve neglected to refill my prescriptions, get my labs done, and reschedule my appointments. It is not something I am trying to recommend to anyone, but the difficultly of taking care of yourself is sometimes just plain irritating and difficult.
The way I’ve justified this behavior is: if I am going to have my ulcerative colitis forever, then I can take care of this later.
It creates this toxic cycle of neglect that can lead to dangerous outcomes. Once I let this neglect and annoyance take over, it’s difficult to pull myself out of it. Sometimes my wakeup call is even a mini flare. This would happen to me because I would view my disease as this burden that I could never escape. Something that only I had to constantly maintain day in and day out, and no one else. With this mentality, there was no way I was going to stay on top of my care. I would ignore things and push appointments off as much as possible. However, after my neglect facilitated the progression of an intense flare, I realized I needed to incorporate my disease into my life in a positive way.
What helped me the most was just treating my ulcerative colitis as a class that I needed to do assignments for and keep up with.
I started to schedule things into my day and treat it as task, rather than a pestering duty that if I didn’t do it, my health would suffer. Sometimes I would even write things into my planner so I could visually see that at this hour I absolutely needed to take my medication and at that hour I needed to call my physician for follow up labs. These were small changes that helped me stay as present as possible while trying to take care of my Ulcerative Colitis. It is something easier said than done but it is okay if you sometimes feel like taking care of yourself is too much and it is too hard. It’s because it is. It’s hard, its draining, and sometimes laziness takes over.
IBD patients are fundamentally built in a way that our health is the one thing always consuming our thoughts, and at some points this mentality overwhelms the mind.
And it is ok, too, at times get angry at our disease and wonder what life would be like without it, but this does no one any good. If you’re anything like me, finding ways to schedule health tasks into your day rather than just “getting around to it” really changed how I take care of myself. It relieved stressors that would follow if I didn’t do certain things for my care and allowed me to just do the task and move on. Just remember that even on days when we don’t feel like taking care of ourselves, we are still doing the best that we can do.
This article is sponsored by Trellus
Trellus envisions a world where every person with a chronic condition has hope and thrives. Their mission is to elevate the quality and delivery of expert-driven personalized care for people with chronic conditions by fostering resilience, cultivating learning, and connecting all partners in care.