I’m Not Dead Yet!

I wanted to take a moment to explain my less-than-regular blog updates as of late:  

Okay, so it hasn’t been quite that bad, but I had a string of several very rough months.  I believe that I have referenced having some serious health issues, and they pretty much rose up and sucker-punched me pretty hard.  I have a chronic illness which onset while I was a junior in high school.  It was in remission until May, 2010, and I have been terribly ill ever since.  The last couple of years have truly tested my will more than ever before.  I am really only starting to recover, and there’s still a long road ahead.  I’d rather not bore you all with the gory details of my health issues, but if you have questions, please feel free to ask me privately.

I unfortunately basically had to put my life on hold to get my health under control.  I took my first year off during the 2009-2010 school year, mostly as a result of my unresolved gender identity issues, though I was not willing to admit that at the time. I had the opportunity to work for a fantastic employment discrimination law firm, and I learned a lot about myself during that year.  Toward the end of my time at the firm, my health issues became active again.   Ever since, I have not had more than a month of peace from my illness.  Things got considerably worse throughout 2012, and though I had a little relief toward the end of the summer, this past fall my health tanked again.  After five semesters of either barely scraping by, or having to take medical leave because of my illness, I was finally forced to accept that I could not push through the pain and the sickness and still succeed.  I needed to stop what I was doing, and focus my energy on my health.

I’m not someone who likes to stand still, and I am so looking forward to the next stage of my life – law school and beyond – so it was hard to accept that I had to press “pause” on moving forward.  But it was also discouraging to see the person that I had to become in order to survive this illness.  I have never felt more flaky or selfish as I did during the worst parts of my flare-up.  Though I understand that I did what I had to do, and that many of my troubles were not under my control, I still couldn’t stand it. That’s never been a part of who I am, and I hated having to live my life that way.

The last week or so have been a huge improvement, without much explanation, though I started to feel sick again yesterday.  I am seeing my doctor on Thursday, and hopefully making a change in my medication.  There’s no guarantee that the next tier of biologic medications will help me, but I’m feeling hopeful.

I am finally getting to a point where I feel like myself again, and I am excited to get back into blogging.  Any of you who are out there still reading my blog, I wanted to let you know that I am still here as well.

That’s all for now.  I’ll be posting pretty regularly from here on out.  Happy New Year, everyone!

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