Living Sick and Dying Young in Rich America

[n2doc]

Chronic illness is the new first-world problem.
LEAH SOTTILE DEC 19 2013,


We were standing at Target in an aisle we’d never walked down before, looking at things we didn’t understand. Pill splitters, multivitamins, supplements, and the thing we were here to buy: a long blue pill box—the kind with seven little doors labeled “S M T W T F S “ for each day of the week, the kind that old people cram their pills into when they have too many to remember what they’ve already taken.

My husband, Joe Preston, shook his head. “Do I really need this?”

I grabbed it off the shelf and threw it in our basket. And when we got home, Joe—then a fit and fairly spry 30-year-old man with a boss-level beard—stood at the kitchen counter, dropping each of his prescriptions with a plink into the container.

I guess it’s true that life is full of surprises, but for the three years since Joe’s crippling pain was diagnosed as the result of an autoimmune disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis, our life has been full of surprises like this one. Pill boxes, trips to the emergency room, early returns from vacation. Terms like “flare-up” have dropped into our vocabulary. We’ve sat in waiting rooms where Joe was the only person without a walker or a cane. Most of our tears have been over the fact that these aren’t the kind of surprises either of us thought we’d be encountering at such a young age.

more

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/living-sick-and-dying-young-in-rich-america/282495/

[blkmusclmachine]

1. ,

,

[Delmette]

2. I'm so sorry

I wish that all the illness would all go away and that both of you could enjoy your young life.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. Chronic illness can strike when you are young.

The article talked about auto-immune diseases. I have one that is an autoimmune disorder, and those are on my mother's side of the family. Fortunately I did not get rheumatoid arthritis.

Chronic conditions won't kill you immediately, but they need treatment anyway. And someone will always be happy to tell you you're lazy or slow, and not understand that you are really sick, and in pain, or whatever.

[Coyote_Bandit]

4. .

My most favorite, most loved person in the world and the one who most infloenced me had AS. He lived to the age of 93. I miss him deeply and think about him often.

Sending good warm thoughts and well wishes for living successfully with this awful disease.

[TBF]

5. It is reality -

but not new. My dad's arthritis struck in his late teens, I made it to early 40s before I was diagnosed. I take the meds but also do what I can with exercise/health (better food choices - eating healthy helps tremendously).