The Backstory

Part 1

I have an invisible illness. 

It’s nameless. 

Looking back, I’ve struggled my entire life with symptoms of allergies, depression and anxiety, sleeping and breathing issues…but it wasn’t until my 20’s that my symptoms began to skyrocket. I first thought I had sprained my ankle but couldn’t remember hurting it. My right foot was swollen and an achy painfulness. It never went away. At the time we had no health insurance so I iced and elevated and the swelling would come and go with varying degrees of severity. It was a few years until I was able to go to a doctor. A course of steroids later I was told they had no diagnosis. “You just swell”. I tried another doctor. X-rays, veinous dopplars, blood work and more for the same non-diagnosis. I was out of money, frustrated and grossed out by my own body. 

Years passed. I had kids and the swelling got worse. Somedays I could literally sink my finger all the way into my foot. Doctor’s still couldn’t give me a why. Meanwhile, other symptoms began to present themselves with increasing severity. Postpartum depression, depression during my pregnancies, anxiety. I found a specialized chiropractor that took some of my daily pain down and even helped relieve a small part of my swelling. I had increasing sinus issues and underwent sinus surgery after scans showed I had essentially no sinus cavities from swelling. My right hand began to swell and, in a panic, I went back to doctors. They took it more seriously this time, now that the swelling was clearly only manifesting itself on the right side. More X-rays, more bloodwork, calls down the hall to come see this swelling, talk of heart issues and rare types of arthritis. I called it quits again and never made the call to the specialist. My gut said they were on the wrong track. When our oldest son was 5 years old, struggling with increasing behaviour issues and began breaking out in hives, we stumbled onto allergies on the advice of a friend. With some success after removing milk from his diet, we made an appointment with a specialist. I decided I “might” still have some sinus issues and could be tested as moral support. Sitting in the waiting room, I was handed a 3 page long list of symptoms to check off and my life changed. I was in tears as I began to check off things I had experienced and never thought might not be “normal”. 

And just like that our lives changed. I had multiple low level allergies. More than a dozen foods, most of the outdoors, dust, molds, animals, the list went on. Not severe enough in any one area to create anaphylactic reactions and small enough that the “normal” person wouldn’t even have a reaction. Mine were in such mass number, however, that they had snowballed through my body, blown past the “normal” signs (throwing up as an infant, eczema and itching, food aversions, etc) and created my body’s own special blend of crazy. My psychological symptoms diminished. My swelling went down enough that I could sometimes wear shoes. 

As the years past, many of the symptoms disappeared. The swelling began to come and go instead of a constant throb in my foot in hand. I began to see patterns emerge and became more in tune with my body - did you know your stomach shouldn’t cramp when you eat? I didn’t. Mine had been that way my entire life. I never liked to eat breakfast because I always was nauseous in the morning - even as a child. You shouldn’t get vivid night terrors after being in the dust it turns out. And you shouldn’t live with headaches so long you think that’s how your head “just feels”. 

After a decade, my swelling is down 90%. To most people, the swelling I still deal with on an almost daily basis would be cause for concern. I’ll admit that as a woman, my vanity has been all but shattered. I have zero self confidence in how I look, although for a 40 year old with 5 kids, I’m at a very healthy weight. I still can rarely wear “cute” shoes, though I’m a far cry from my only shoes being a pair of crocs that could expand with my grotesquely swollen foot while they clopped around on my other. I still wear compression socks most days. My back often swells, as does one eye. 

As the symptoms I had lived with so long disappeared, different ones began to intensify…