Pretty Green Eyes

She is very obviously me

I’d start off by introducing you to myself. Telling you all of the interesting things about my life.... except that I can’t.

Every day of my life is the same now, hours bleed in to days. Days in to weeks. If I’m lucky I’ll get a small glimpse of the person I once was, if not I’ll dream. I dream of what I could once do, what I want more than anything to do now, what I want for my family but most of all I dream of some sense of normalcy.

I used to be a socialite. I loved being around people. People I knew already & new faces. I just craved human interaction.

At about 25 years old I was at, what felt like, the prime of my life! I had the career, the supporting family, so many beautiful friends that my phone would light up like a Christmas tree with invites, memes & simple ‘hellos’. A stark comparison to the life I live now.

When I was at my peak, I felt pretty unbreakable. Life was good. Life was beyond good - it was fun, it was exciting. It was full of endless potential.

Until it wasn’t.

At 26 years old I got a migraine. Not at all unusual for me. The unusual part of this is that this particular migraine would NEVER go away. Life was about to change, and not in the ways I’d planned. Not in the ways I somehow felt I deserved.

Bedridden for weeks. Lying in complete darkness not able to talk as my own voice would set of a wave of intense pain throughout my entire head, I hit what I then thought was rock bottom. In heinsight I had only just started falling.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t function. I was emotional, devastated, wondering what on earth I had done in a past life to deserve this unbearable, unstoppable pain.

These were some of the darker times in my life. My thoughts were fueled by anger, sadness, and a ‘woe is me’ attitude. Every thought consisted of ‘I want this to end, make it end’! I often wonder if I knew then that it was about to get worse, if I was about to really hit rock bottom and break every part of myself on the way down, would those dark thoughts have gotten the better of me. Would I be sharing my story now?

Yet, here I am. Over the little short moments in my day where the glaring light of my phone screen isn’t filling my head with the unbearable pain it usually does, writing. Writing to bring awareness to a condition not well known, writing to perhaps share the burden a little and lift a weight off of my shoulders that gets heavier by the day, or maybe just writing because if someone, anyone will listen, I might feel that little bit less alone in the world.

There’s not a lot these days that doesn’t trigger my pain levels and send me spiralling into days or weeks in a dark room. Alone. Missing out on spending precious moments with my girl, my fiancé and my family. Missing out on all of the normal day to day activities that a chronically ill person craves.

I’m alive but, am I truly living?

As I write pain pulsates through the left side of my head while a sharp fire burns up through the left side of my jaw. What feels like tunnels inside my brain fill with lightning strikes and a deep thudding that follows each one. I feel my stomach start to make waves as the unrelenting nausea starts to set in. I hear my teeth grinding together as my body uses any coping mechanism it can to ward off the pain. If I get to my abortives right now I stand a chance of lowering my pain scale from a 10 to a 7. But my body speaks “Youre too late”. And it’s right. It’s always right.