1:28pm September 28, 2015

Do not mess with my life right now.

I don’t think I’ve made one of these posts since my dad was diagnosed with cancer, but it’s time for one again:

I’ve got serious medical issues I’m dealing with that are stressful both physically and emotionally. And that’s not ‘issues’ that actually means ‘one issue’. That’s ‘issues’ that means I’m on two separate antibiotics for two entirely separate and unrelated infections, and that alone is putting a level of strain on my body from both the infections and the meds that is highly unsettling.
I’ve got an equally serious offline issue right now that has led to me needing to rapidly clean up and organize my apartment. I’ve been in full-bore housecleaning mode(1) for a couple of weeks. I won’t be able to fully rest until I get a roommate.
My mother just almost died. If she hadn’t been literally inside the Mayo Clinic at the time her autonomic dysfunction and myasthenia gravis decided to go completely haywire, it wouldn’t have been almost. Of course, it was the tests they did that set off the reaction, but still. She could just as easily have ended up with that sort of thing happening at home for some other reason, and I’m worried.

A reminder: I have severe adrenal insufficiency. This means that stress can make me very sick, hospitalize me, or even kill me – both physical and emotional stress. By depleting cortisol faster than I can make it.

I am taking extra dexamethasone, but dexamethasone is no more a foolproof solution to stress + adrenal insufficiency than insulin is a foolproof solution to diabetes + high blood sugar + extra sugary foods. It’s not as simple as just adding in the hormones your endocrine system isn’t making properly, and everything will be fine. Your body can still get plenty screwed up on its own. If you could just control diabetes instantly with insulin, nobody would go into comas anymore once they were diagnosed. And adrenal insufficiency is the same way, you can stress dose, but that doesn’t mean the underlying problem is gone and sometimes you can end up in an adrenal crisis anyway.
Today I reached some sort of level of stress that I haven’t since my dad was dying. And I realized that even minor additional stress can tip me over the edge into a truly dangerous level of stress.

And I consider deliberately stressing out a person you know has adrenal insufficiency and is already incredibly stressed out, to be equivalent to deliberately camera-flashing someone you know has photosensitive epilepsy – it’s a form of assault, and a particularly reckless one given that you’re messing with diseases that can kill people. And if anything does happen to me as a result of anyone deliberately messing with me, I have plenty of friends and allies who will fully look into the matter. So don’t.

And if you feel like picking a fight with me, pick one sometime i can handle it, now isn’t the time. (And if you do pick a fight, knowing everything I’ve just told you… yeah, just don’t.)

And if this seems wrong to you, of me to be requesting ‘special treatment’ or something, I’m just going to quote the article So You Know a Dyke With CFS (bolding my own):

DON’T think I’m being manipulative when I have to excuse myself from a stressful dynamic. Most people will check out of an argument when it reaches the level of screaming and throwing objects. Because of this disease, I experience much lower grades of conflict as being that stressful and life-threatening, and I have to check out. I am accountable in my relationships to people, but sometimes it takes me longer, with more periods of time-out, in order to work through a difficult issue. Don’t make me hang up on you.

So… yeah. Don’t. Just don’t. And don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say ‘life-threatening’ in this context. I’m not.

(1) Housecleaning mode, for me, means working really hard at planning out how to clean the house, and then directing other people in how to do it, while taking part physically in only some aspects of it because I’m not capable of most housecleaning tasks. The fun part comes in when the people capable of the tasks aren’t capable of the planning and get confused or bothered by my instructions because they can’t see what I’m trying to do so they think I’m doing it wrong.

Notes: