The LOVEolution » Seven Lessons I Learned From Disease (series, #1)

Simply Serenity

Inspiration for inner peace and love by Lauralyn, a yoga and angel therapist.

Seven Lessons I Learned From Disease (series, #1)

by Lauralyn Harter

August 27th, 2010

Lesson #1: Always trust yourself.

The Dark Ages

My journey to disease began the day I was born. I had an ear infection and the doctors promptly put me on antibiotics. The infection never cleared, and the prescriptions kept coming. I was so congested as a child, I sounded like I had a perpetual cold. It was really allergies, but the doctor thought it was a stubborn infection, so every day, for years, I took antibiotics the same way one would take a daily vitamin.

And I never got better.

When I was eight, my eardrum burst. I can still remember the momentary deafness and warm sensation of blood as it trickled down my cheek. My hearing was left with some damage, and my health continued to deteriorate. As a kid, I prayed I wouldn’t be called on to read aloud or even worse – read standing in front of the class – because I was so painfully congested, I was embarrassed to be heard. When I developed asthma in grade school, I could no longer run track the way I used to. The green field that had once felt so freeing to sprint suddenly felt like a pillow over my face.

The world back then didn’t feel like a wonderful place. I was always sick and ultra sensitive to things that didn’t bother others, like smells and fabrics. I was super sensitive to my environment, including the people in it. Everything seemed to affect me in a negative way.

And the pills kept on coming.

I was prescribed birth control pills at fifteen for menstrual irregularities. At the same time, the children’s therapist I was seeing to help me cope with my dysfunctional family prescribed me my first anti-depressant. It didn’t work. I spent the next ten years experimenting with different prescriptions. None of them worked for me, and some had awful side effects that took me through an emotional roller-coaster. Those were the dark ages in my human life. Boy, did I learn about suffering. And the worst was yet to come.

Whenever I asked a doctor in those days why I was having symptoms, I either got a shrug or some diluted medical explanation that sounded good but didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I remember thinking, “Do they really know what they’re doing?” I felt like an experiment most of the time when I was in doctor’s office. It was like, “let’s try this pill and see if it works.”

I didn’t receive a lot of compassion back then. No one ever said to me, “You have the power to change this.”

The message was clearly, “This is who you are as a result of your emotional experiences or a physiological glitch or DNA or just rotten luck, and there’s little you can do about it except take drugs and manage life as best as you can.”

I felt like I was drowning and the only thing doctors could do to help me was throw me a bottle of medicine. When doctors looked at me, they didn’t see the spark of bright light that had been buried by the pain. They didn’t consider that my body had it’s own wisdom and messages for me. They didn’t express any faith or hope that my conditions would change. Everything felt so cold and permanent back then. A diagnosis, and I had many, felt like sentences. The doctors were like judges, determining my fate.

“I now sentence you to eczema! You shall live the next 30 years of your life with itchy and red skin and there’s nothing you can do about it except hope this cream will help!”

I was judged a lot in those days. Being sick was not only a nightmare not only for me, but the doctors who treated me. I questioned everything and grew angry when they couldn’t give me answers, or even worse, acted condescending with me. My sensitivities weren’t understood, let alone celebrated as they are now, and I was often referred to as “neurotic” and given the “there’s something off with this one” look. I didn’t feel my thoughts or feelings were taken seriously, or were of any interest when it came to my medical doctors. My own intuition and observations had no relevance, and if I kept persisting to tell them how I felt, I was promptly referred to a psychiatrist.

The doctors I chose were greater teachers to me than I realized at the time.

So I was cast as an unhappy and unstable girl, and I played this role because I didn’t know any other. I had no healthy role models. I had no model at all for what happy and healthy looked like or felt like. For a very long time, I felt I had fallen into a black hole. I felt buried by the pain I had experienced, including verbal and physical abuse, a volatile and violent home life and statutory rape. I felt misunderstood, different and very alone. During those dark ages in my teen years, I believed maybe I had been damaged beyond repair.

Free at Last

When I was in my twenties, I was still struggling with health issues. I was still racking in the prescriptions. In my short life thus far, I had already been diagnosed with chronic conditions of allergies, Dysmenorrhea, ovarian cysts, PMDD, asthma, eczema, depression, insomnia and an anxiety disorder. The shelves in my medicine cabinet were stocked with lots of plastic orange bottles. I was a Big Pharma baby. I was the new generation born into the pharmaceutical boom. And I was one of its best customers. Which is what almost killed me.

But there were other things, too, like my lifestyle. My world moved fast, and I was exhausted. My job was demanding. My social life was demanding. I lived in New York City and I had to keep up. I drank pots of coffee and loved sugar, particularly Diet Coke. I even took up smoking, after choking on the things, because how else did you cope with stress? I had no clue, nor time to figure it out. There were bills to pay and things to do, and my body just had to fit into my way of living.

I didn’t think I was doing anything insanely unhealthy. In fact, I believed, for once in my life, that I was completely normal! Everyone else around me was exhausted and struggling to wake up in the morning. They were drinking coffee and sodas, eating candy bars and smoking cigarettes to help get them through the long day. Everyone I knew was on a prescription for something. I was no different than anyone else.

If I did meet someone who suggested a more “natural” alternative, I gave them the “something is off with this one” look that I had once received myself.

My body would soon show me that I had a lot to learn, and it was determined that I get the lesson. After all, I had work to do on this planet. And there wasn’t time to waste. God knew I needed a wake-up a call. The Universe being generous, I ended up getting three.

The Big “D”

I finally had my big break. After years of working at a bookstore through college, I was hired for my first “real” job. I was an assistant to a literary agent in Manhattan. The office had a view of Broadway. I bought my morning bagels at the same deli where David Letterman bought his. I took messages from celebrities. I read manuscripts from aspiring and well-known authors. An aspiring writer myself, I was living in the hub of my dream world. My future was filled with promise, my aspirations were on the brink of being realized.

And then it happened.

The BIG message from my body started to rumble. This fresh new start would quickly come to an end. My life would never be the same.

I was house sitting for one of the agents who lived with a famous author’s son in a beautiful downtown apartment. It was New Years weekend and I was lying sick in bed watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. I thought I had food poisoning. I felt feverish, had terrible pain and couldn’t keep anything down. I figured I had the holiday break to recover. But when it was time to go back to work, I was still sick. I found it harder and harder to make it to work every day. Eventually, I called in sick one too many times. And I got the boot.

I was heartbroken. I had never been fired before, nor had I had a job that was so promising and supportive of my creative abilities and dreams. My body was failing me, and I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t have health insurance or extra money in my pocket, so seeing a doctor wasn’t an option. I went into denial mode, big time.

I applied at a less demanding job at The Strand, a quirky used bookstore downtown. I thankfully started my shift feeling at least I was still connected to the literature and culture of the city, ignoring the fact that I was starting this new job in a body that was about to give out.

I refused to see the chalky white skin in the mirror. I refused to notice the clothes that began to hang off my rail thin body. I dealt with the worsening symptoms as if they were just an inconvenience to take care of as quickly and nonchalantly as possible. This case of food poisoning, I thought, was severe. I was growing weaker. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t stop throwing up or going to the bathroom. My whole body ached. Abdominal pain came in horrific waves and I held on, gripping my hands tight to the books as I shakily put them on the shelf. Praying for it to go away. Just go away so I can go on with my life.

One evening, witnesses say I turned a shade of green and my emaciated body could no longer stand. I was rushed to the emergency room, poked, prodded, IV’d and sent home without a diagnosis. After my release, the landlord discovered me lying unconscious in my bed where I had been for at least a week. I had a fever of 104. It was then that I was finally diagnosed. The diagnosis was Crohn’s disease. I was 95 pounds, emaciated, but didn’t see it. I didn’t want to. I could barely walk, but fought the wheelchair idea in the hospital. I still couldn’t grasp that I was really ill, that I had a disease, even though I was hooked up to several IV’s, in my arms, wrists and between my fingers. My mantra for my body in those days was, “never mind this, you will listen to me!” I watched a Groundhog Day marathon (talk about a sign) on the hospital TV, counting the minutes until my release when I planned to meet a girlfriend at our favorite bar in the East Village.

Was I crazy?

No. I was twenty-one.