I am curious to see how many others out there with chronic illnesses were sick a lot as children. When I look back to my childhood, I was sick all of the time. At the age of 5, I had the mumps and that was after I had been given the mumps shot. At the age of 7, I was hospitalized for a week with pneumonia, was at the doctor’s office several times a year for upper respiratory problems, fatigue, urinary tract infections (UTI), yeast infections, etc.
I remember feeling bad most of the time, but a lot of people thought I was a hypochondriac including some of my teachers at school. I was also told different times that I was trying to seek attention by “claiming” to always be sick. But I truly did feel bad and I can remember having a lot of pain in different areas of my body that were brushed off as growing pains.
With regards to my Interstitial Cystitis, I repeatedly had UTIs and I have always gone to the bathroom a lot. As a teenager I can remember joking with a friend of mine about buying her rolls of toilet paper because I was always going to the bathroom a lot at her house. In my early 20’s when traveling with my husband and in-laws, they would always make jokes about my constant need to stop to use the restrooms in our travels.
So think back to your childhood and see if you can relate symptoms and illnesses to your chronic illness(es) you currently have.
Please feel free to post a comment about this! I would really like to hear about you!
okay this is *sort of* related, but…
I have this secret fear of all the vaccines given in childhood. I’m afraid that they might have side effects that we are not fully aware of. I had my initial shots as a baby, but then I never went back to have the updates. I was healthy as a child, but it was only when I was 20 and suffered an extreme illness that the fatigue set in; but again, I don’t have it that severe.
But my daighter had a severe reaction to her first DPT vaccine, and it was so bad that she can’t have the Pertussis vaccine any more.
She suffers from speech delays now and we’re in speech therapy.
I have a bad feeling (based on all the research I’ve done on vaccines) that we might be harming kids more than helping them with the tons of vaccines we pump into them in just their first year.
I have been reading different articles that discuss how vaccines are actually more harmful than helpful. But if parents would refuse the vaccines, they would be turned in to Social Services.
It’s not SS I’m worried about – it’s the fact that a child cannot go to public school unless they’ve had ALL the shots…they even have a chicken pox vaccine now, which people are worried might cause Shingles later in life.
The only way to get out of it in most states is to sign a piece of paper that says you have “religious objections” to vaccines, etc.
The whole thing pisses me off.
I was ill a LOT as a child. I can’t remember a morning when I woke up feeling good and ready to take on the world. I had lots of allergies; to chemicals and just plain environmentals. I had a lot of bronchial infections. I had a much lower pain threshold than anyone else around. I was told by my father that it was imposible for *whatever stimuli* to hurt me and that I had to be pretending. When my menses came, I spent a day a month in bed because of the pain. I, like you, was considered to be a hypochondriac by most of my family and surrounding adults.
I had chicken pox when I was 5 or 6 and I was so sick with it my mother made me a bed out in the main part of the house so she could keep a constant eye on me. I had mononucliosis (which is a first cousin to chicken pox) when I was in 2nd grade which kept me out of school, and in bed, for 2 months. I had Epstein Barr Virus (again, first cousin to both chicken pox and mono,) in my 20’s that took me, literally, years, to get over.
I have often wondered which came first… nerve damage causing the FMS and an ineffective immune system… or an ineffective immune system, which allowed me to catch the viruses which caused all the nerve damaga. I grew up in a time that the long term effects of chemicals weren’t really considered. I remember the use of agent orange to get rid of vegitation by the side of the roads. I remember trucks which loosed a foul smelling fog supposed to kill mosquitos. I remember breathing in and being made ill by both of those, but my family members weren’t. Or… at least they wouldn’t admit to it. They all had a reputation to keep up, since admitting to being made ill by the chemical would have made them suspect of being a hypochondriac too.