Alexis Rosen was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease after much confusion and months of searching for answers. She has since begun IV antibiotic therapy.
After (finally) being diagnosed and deciding on a treatment path, what can you do to better yourself, your outcome and quality of life? Check out her 5 ways below!
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Be kind to yourself, let go of internalized guilt.
Pain and guilt are two things we feel everyday as people who deal with a chronic illness. Please remember to treat yourself with the same kindness as you treat those you love. After all, we live with ourselves 24/7, so be nice because it’s much easier to love ourselves when we are being nice to ourselves.
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Check in with your caregiver.
It can be easy to forget with everything on our plate that our caregiver/significant other’s lives have now been altered as much as our own in different ways. We should allow our loved ones space to process their own emotions, grief and feelings just as we have had to process our own. No matter who you are on either side of the coin, validation and reassurance is the best thank-you to those who love us.
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Be in the now.
It would be an impossible task to say “don’t get overwhelmed!” Even super heroes get overwhelmed! Being mindful can be a number of different things, such as deep breathing, sensory input (focusing on the feeling of a soft blanket or the sound of a cat’s purr), or meditation. If mediation feels like it’s impossible to do, start off with meditative tutorial on YouTube or on many apps. I began to do meditative sleep hypnosis nightly to help with my sleep and nightmares from herxing-it works!.
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Be in control of how you influence yourself.
With an impossible amount of medicines, appointments, new ways of living, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel like giving up. An example might be since my own inclusion of my picc line, I hate how often I’m asking other people to help me with my new fangled robot arm, however, I am trying to focus on what is within my own control and to take ahold of that. I can control how well I take care of myself and learn to understand and accept what is in my own control. Another way to have a positive self-influence is to realistically envision what the stronger future you looks like, how success will feel and hold on to those happy feelings to revisit when things get tough. Make your own emotional emergency kit with mantras, self care exercises and whatever else makes you happy from the inside.
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Who are you now?
Only after a year of being ill with the devastating effects of Lyme, have I begun to have the confidence and emotional space to revisit who I am. Having had so much stripped from us who live with chronic illness, we may not have our jobs, activities or abilities to know who we really are anymore. Instead of ruminating on how we feel like burdensome blobs, or listless lumps, it is important spiritually and emotionally to rediscover who you are. A powerful cognitive change is to say “I am living with my illness,” instead of “I am only what my illness allows.” When we say words aloud to set ourselves apart from our illnesses, emotionally we begin to feel better about ourselves.
