Please Help! Chronic Illness and Meeting People

Topics: Please Help, Traits

Over the week­end I received an impor­tant e-mail from a chronic fatigue folk out in Cal­i­for­nia.  He brought up a com­mon dilemma and I can think of no group more expe­ri­enced (trans­lated: pre­pared) to dis­cuss such an issue than y’all.

To be hon­est, I am not con­vinced my answer to this ques­tion is the best, so I want to put this out there for as many responses as pos­si­ble before I pub­lish my own answer.  Please opine via a com­ment on this post:

When you meet new peo­ple do you vol­un­teer the fact that you have a chronic ill­ness, or do you wait to dis­cuss it until it becomes an issue?  When you tell them how do you bring it up?  What do you say?

You folks are always so inspir­ing and hon­est.  I look for­ward to hear­ing your responses.  Thank you for your help.

I will post my response tomor­row night.

Existing Comments

    Comment by Amy on January 19, 2009 @ 11:51 pm

    I don’t bring it up right away. Some peo­ple will ask when they see me out some­where & not drink­ing alco­hol. I don’t mind telling peo­ple, but occa­sion­ally I will run across some­one who does not believe in Fibro, and all of a sud­den I feel so small.

    Comment by Diana on January 20, 2009 @ 5:17 am

    I am newly diag­nosed, but have had degen­er­a­tive disc dis­ease and pain for years. I wait until a ques­tion comes up about my health or lim­i­ta­tion. I am not sure how it will change now that I have Fibro. At this time I feel more guarded because peo­ple do not know much about it.

    Comment by Rochelle on January 20, 2009 @ 8:59 am

    I usu­ally wait to bring it up. Occa­sion­ally there is a sit­u­a­tion that has required it to be brought up. For exam­ple, I deliv­ered sev­eral boxes of Bibles to my church recently and asked for a guy to come help me bring them in. The recep­tion­ist looked a lit­tle sur­prised, so I explained to her that I have chronic pain and the boxes are too heavy for me to be lift­ing with­out highly pay­ing for it tomor­row. In that instance, it became a neces­sity to explain myself. You’ll always feel that imme­di­ate shame and fear of their reac­tion… but gen­er­ally I think peo­ple try to under­stand. They just don’t under­stand. That’s just the way it works. Unless they per­son­ally know some­one who has a chronic ill­ness, they don’t get it. I sure didn’t get it before I had it. I think the more we edu­cate peo­ple about it, the bet­ter it will be for all of us. So yes, even­tu­ally I tell every­one now. But it took me about 17 months after hav­ing the symp­toms before I started get­ting com­fort­able telling peo­ple, because that’s when I got the offi­cial diag­no­sis (even though through research I was sure that’s what it was). I think there’s some­thing to be said for research­ing and learn­ing a lot about it on your end before becom­ing very vocal about it. Because if you don’t know enough to fully explain it and answer any ques­tions they come up with, it’ll be even more dif­fi­cult for you. Get your­self to a point first of know­ing more and feel­ing com­fort­able with who you are now, then you’ll feel like telling peo­ple more freely.
    Hope this helps. :)

    Comment by K8 on January 25, 2009 @ 5:31 pm

    Thank you for your feed­back. I appre­ci­ate your input and am sure it will be help­ful to our CFS friend in need…

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