Sickly

I hate 7up. It was my fate as a child to drink flat 7up whenever I threw up.  I drank a lot of flat 7up. 7up, Orange and Yellow Triamnic, and Robitussin, they were like my 5th food group. A routine punctuated by high fevers, tepid baths, and doctors office visits.

But I got older.  I traded a pediatrician for a rheumatologist.  Triaminc, which no one could ever convince me to take again - even if they paid me, for prednisone, remicade, and a myriad of other medications. In all of it, in all my life the consistency would be, 'me not being healthy' coupled with 'me trying to hide the fact that I'm not healthy'. However, like anything else in life I couldn't hide or run from it forever and this week my bad health, my denial, and reality all collided.

I had to send an email to my siblings this week.  My sister has been pretty aware of my health problems and my tendency to hide them whenever I could but, my brother has not been.  He and I live in the same town, the same town as our aging parents. When their health took a turn for the worse this winter, they suddenly went from aging to aged.  That is when I came to a painful crossroads, I had to tell my brother about my own failing health.  I couldn't help with my parents the way I should and because it's a long term situation I had to come clean with him.

I wrestled with it...  I wrestled with it for weeks.  Hinted, superficially explained hoping that would somehow suffice and that I wouldn't have to come right out and say it but, in the end I knew I had to actually lay it all out on the table.  Seems like a silly concern.  Who would worry about such a ridiculous confession, yet if you didn't know what I was confessing, if you only saw my anxiety about it, you would think I had committed a grievous sin.

Why?  I had to ask myself why I was so afraid of admitting such a silly innocent thing. I know why!

Like many people who are adopted, I am sure that I am not alone in this insatiable need to have to attach a reason to being 'given up'. At least I know it has been that way for me and the very first excuse I ever made for my birth parents was when I was about 6 or 7 years old.  I told myself that they gave me up because somehow they knew I would be sickly and they would not be able to care for me.  My adoptive parents always made it clear that my birth parents wanted the best for me. In this case, their best for me were adoptive parents who would care for me better or maybe care for me when my birth parents didn't want to care for a sickly baby.

Over the years the excuses came and went - when I was 9 a boy in our neighborhood told me that I was put up for adoption because my birth parents thought I was ugly. As I got older it was because they were young and unmarried, because they wanted more for me, because, because, because.  In all of the reasons, noble or not, there was always an underlying element of rejection, a reason to be rejected.  I suppose that as I wrote a long email to my brother and sister explaining 'Ankylosing Spondylitis', explaining how long I have had it, how it has effected my health, how it is effecting me now, my limitations (truly painful to admit and write), and then working up the nerve to press send, that my fear was 'rejection'. This fear has controlled me throughout my life.

The fear that if I am honest about my health problems, I run the risk of being rejected because I am sickly.

However, all of that aside, I pressed send.  I waited for a response. I panicked. It was a day at least. His response was short. I over analyzed it trying to pull more out of the couple sentences that came back in his response. I completely recognized the existence of that fear.  I see now how it has kept me trying to hide my disease and how I 'feel' from most everyone. Knowing that by itself it doesn't really change anything, though it is a start, it is more than not realizing or acknowledging it.

Right now I have a glass next to my bed of nearly flat 7up.  I have been sipping it all day after throwing up all night. I hate flat 7up. I hate being sick. I hate that it scares me and makes me feel vulnerable.