Being Chronically Ill in High School (October 23, 2018)

Being chronically ill is the worst. Scratch that. Being chronically ill and in high school is the actual worst. While all your friends get to have sleepovers and stay out late, you are stuck at home because you’re sick and too weak to stand. While everyone gets to take every AP class offered that you want to take so badly, you have to “lighten your load” so you don’t get too far behind when you miss two weeks of school because you couldn’t get out of bed. On top of that, you get the stares. Not the kind of stares that people want, not that anyone really wants to be stared at, but the uncomfortable stares when your stomach decides to erupt with noise just because you decided to eat that moring. Although you know they try not to, it is involuntary. But you don’t blame them, you would probably stare too if you heard what sounds like a lion roar coming from someone’s stomach.

No matter how hard you try to hide it, everyone always ends up finding out. After a little while your teachers start to question why you are out so often. Or, if you can even make it through a school day, why you had to run to the bathroom so many times that you ended up just not coming back. They start to wonder why such a smart and hardworking person takes such easy classes. And although you don’t want to tell them because you don’t want to be the sick girl that everyone pities, you have to give them some reason. They try to sympathize, but there is only so much they can do when you aren’t there for any of the lessons.

Just to make everything worse, you don’t even have a diagnosis for what you have. Instead, you have to explain to everyone the story of how for the last four years you have been ill, but no one can seem to find the reason. Which to you, discredits the entire sickness because if everyone is telling you you’re fine, maybe you are. But that’s not the case. Eventually they will find out what’s wrong, and hopefully, the pain that you have been feeling can be lessened. In the meantime, of course, you must hear everyone’s opinion on what’s wrong with you and smile and nod as if you haven’t tried everything they are suggesting, because you have, more than once.

As a highschooler, you have so many other things to deal with, whether it be school work, extra curricular activities, a job, or friend trouble. But when you put a chronic illness on top of that, it just seems absolutely impossible to get through. It is the worst thing that could happen to a once healthy teen who just wants to live a normal life. Not only are there very few people who really understand that you can talk to, but there’s no one way to make life easier. Not everyone has the same symptoms, or can be helped with medicine. Therefore, there is no one way to go about having a chronic illness in high school. It is up to you to figure out what is best for you, and sometimes, most of the time really, it is not what you want to do. Or what your parents or teachers or even college applications want you to do. It is hard to give up everything you want to do in general, but when you are in highschool, trying to figure out what you want to do, it really limits those choices, leaving you unsatisfied and overall disappointed at your doctors, your sickness, and most of all, yourself.