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My Medications Aren’t Making Me Sick, This is My Better
“You take a lot of pills. Are you sure they aren’t making you sick?”
The problem with having a chronic illness is that society has the ingrained perspective that everything is supposed to get better. Take these pills, change your diet, exercise, realign your chakras, pray every night and whatever ails you will be cured. Chronic illness never gets better and it never goes away. Managing a chronic illness is about symptom relief and quality of life, not searching for a magical cure.
My first experience with someone criticizing medications was my mother telling me not to take antidepressants because they would “change my personality” as if that was the worst possible thing that could happen to me. Spoiler alert, they changed my personality into someone less depressed! I remember my father telling my then-husband that I didn’t need the pills, I just needed more sunshine. Even my former family doctor approached my antidepressants as a stop-gap measure that I would no longer need once I just “got better”.
Ironically, I don’t even take that many pills. My evening dose consists of 100mg of sertraline for the major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder and a hormonal birth control for the unholy mess that is my uterus and ovaries. Recently, my reproductive system has upped its rebellious…
