A friend sent me a message this morning saying she went to the emergency room the other day for a certain chronic issue she’s been having for the past two years. It’s something doctors don’t really understand and so they lump it in together with something else in order to give her some medicine and make her feel better.
I’m not professionally qualified to diagnose her, but I’m pretty sure I know what’s wrong because it sounds extremely similar to the problems I’m just now starting to get over. The difference between me and her is that I’ve been extremely proactive and optimistic about the condition and my ability to fully recover even when doctors suggested it wouldn’t be likely.N I’ve proved them wrong and learned a lot about the body and good habits since then.
At first she was eager to listen to my advice about how to heal and get over what she’s dealing with. But most of my advice wasn’t as easy as taking a pill. Most of what I suggested was all around “healthy lifestyle” advice, nothing too wacky. I suggested she cut her caffeine habit, stop forcing herself to stay awake when she’s tired, cut out the processed foods, stretch and/or exercise drink water more regularly and pay more attention to her bodily sensations. I also suggested she worked out some emotional issues that cause her a lot of stress and that have probably been weighing down on her for years. She went for the pills instead.
Now as I watch her situation get worse and worse without any real answers from the doctors besides “take a pill”, it kind of hurts. She’s a wonderful person and I want to see her happy and healthy. I don’t think know if my advice on its own would be enough to cure her of her “mysterious” ailments, but I know they’d definitely put her in a position to be much more proactive about healing where she could find the answer.
Still, there’s not much I can do now. Sometimes you just have to let people go their own way and learn their own lessons at whatever cost and wish them the best. I still try to make suggestions to her but in the end, I need to respect her choices, even when they’d are self-damaging.
I still trust in the universe and it’s ability to show us what we need to see and push us along to where we need to go. I used to feel pretty upset about this kind of thing. I’m ok, but I hope she’ll find the answers herself soon enough.
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Confessions of the Damaged - a collection of short stories
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by @skyleap
First off I want to commend you for taking control of your own being and embracing the power within you to overcome anything <333 Much respect and mad props.
Second, as I am in the process of upping my own self mastery game, I thank you for the inspiration & continued fuel for motivation.
Third...I am very much in the process of making peace with/coming to terms that indeed we must sometimes just let people go, and walk our path. We can only sew the seeds I suppose. As they say...you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.
Bright Blessings BeautyFull Soul. Thank you for Being You.
Reiki Hugs
Everybody's on their own unique path with their own unique lessons to learn. Each of us is benefiting the collective with our experiences. She has lessons that her soul wants to learn, and we have to honor that! I used to be a real pusher. Now I'm an honorer. :)
I have a feeling we will be inspiring each other. X-D
Thank you so much for this comment
Great stuff. Really well written post. It's like there is this certain variety of person who seems to take solace in illness and the attention it summons, soaking up the energy of people's empathy and concern for their condition and mistaking the medical treatment and all that care as something beneficial. I guess it's too deep in their subconscious for them to see the absurdity of it. They use unwellness to invite sympathy into their lives to the point that they start to enjoy it.
The way you put it makes it really easy for me to make my “unprofessional” diagnosis. Most people don’t receive enough acceptance from their parents and teachers and friends growing up.
I think that really sums it up there @whatamidoing. It's probably one of the most difficult things to stand by watching someone going down a path that you are certain will not support their current issues.
But in the end, that path will serve them in one way or another. We all have a journey and we all learn in our own ways. The best we can do is share our experiences and offer a hand if it is needed.
We can lead a horse to the river, but we can't make it drink the water. That's just part of what this life thing is all about!
I'm really sorry to hear about your friend but I do appreciate you sharing this as I know it's one of the more difficult things to deal with.
It sounds like you're a great friend and who knows, maybe one day that friend of yours will come back to you and say something like, "Thank you for your wise words, you were right."
On a more uplifting note, I wanted to let you know that I featured you in my recent post! Check it out here: Steemit DISCOVERIES with @axios [EP 2]: Steemians Worth Following!
I can only hope she will come back and even if she doesn’t say thanks, I hope she can see then what I see now, that the solutions are within her, not outside of her.
Thanks for the feature! I’ll go check it out. And thanks for the support for deadpost!
Anytime my friend :)
I hear and understand your frustration. I am curious what her symptoms are because the advice you gave her are some of the things I discovered that helped me with my issues of vertigo - especially cutting back on caffeine, making sure I drink lots f water, and watching how my body responds when eating certain foods (i.e. I discovered I had to cut out anything with corn syrup.)
I do not know what kind of pill she is taking, but as an individual who works in the mental health field I can honestly say that I do not trust doctors, including psychiatrists, to always have good judgement when prescribing medications. There are some mental health diagnoses that certainly can benefit from psychotropic medication, but these medications are over-prescribed and I have seen some of my clients get worse with the medications that were prescribed to them. I can understand the lure of the “magic pill” to make ones woes go away, so I have some empathy. I wish medical doctors had the time to look at their clients more holistically instead of being pill pushers, so I guess in part you can put some responsibility on your friend’s doctor and the system they work under.
She has vertigo now, I never got that far. For a long time she has had what doctors call panic attacks. Her heart will beat really fast, or sometimes she has a hard time breathing. I gave her a massage to see if she had any tightness in the places I had. Turns out she did. The nerves of the neck, if put under too much pressure from chronic bad posture, lack of exercise and pressure on the spine will put your body into a panic, I’m pretty sure she has this problem because I had this problem until I did an lot of therapy on my neck and shoulders and her symptoms are exactly the same as mind, it’s always worse when laying down to sleep, too.
Since this experience I’ve spent s lot of time with eastern doctors and listened to many of their patients stories. I believe most illness starts with conflicting emotions and thoughts and often makes it’s first physical manifestations in the muscles, often the back muscles. From there it can affect various parts of the body depending on which vertebrae it is affecting. I’m not certified in anything but I’ve met enough people with problems and seem how proper massage can help them with almost anything.
The medical doctors told me the same thing, I had “panic attacks” except they weren’t panic attacks they were my nerves responding to too much pressure, not only literally but actually physically.
There is something to say about how the mind and the body are interconnected. I too was told I was having panic attacks, but I knew that I was not going through any additional or unusual stressors at the time. Truth be told, I WAS having panic attacks, but not because of an anxiety disorder but because the vertigo was making me feel like I was going to pass out and/or die. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? In my case, the vertigo came first...
It is such a weird problem but I guess rather common - and it can be caused by so many different things (i.e. ear infection, head injury, dehydration) I went to a neurologist and he sent me to a physical therapist. They diagnosed me as having problems with my vestibular system. Basically, as you said, working on the neck and shoulder muscles can help. there are so many people who are chronically dehydrated too, which was partly the issue, and I now drink half caf/half decaf coffee in the morning. My physical therapist asked me if I was taking any anti-anxiety medication at the time (which I was not) because although Xanax can be a shot of bliss it ultimately will make ones vertigo worse.
Hah! Amazing! Almost the same issue. You are so lucky to have a doctor who caught this problem, many don’t, and I think it’s an extremely common undiagnosed problem. You make your own luck though ;-)
You can give yourself massages the whole neck, minus the jugular vein, so from the side to the back. The muscles that connect the neck to the shoulders too and also your shoulder blades and shoulder pressure points with a tennis or lacrosse ball. I’ve almspt fully healed this way.
I got soooo much better after I totally quit caffeine. I still indulge about once a month but I always regret it.
Thanks for sharing this with us, buddy.
I think the health advice you were giving her would benefit anyone. It's very close to what I try to do and tell myself. I know I could do better, but it seems to work well enough. At least enough to make me stay away from doctors and medication these days.
People are stubborn though and no matter how well (meant) your advice - drawn from your own experience - has been, she's a different person and you're right, you can't force anything on her.
As you were saying: "hope she’ll find the answers herself soon enough."
P.S. Who knows, perhaps someone might read this and decide to take their health in their own hands. That way you would have helped someone after all...
I wasn’t pretty bad at following this advice until my body started rejecting my treatment of it, then I started to listen. It’s sad that her body telling her doesn’t motivate her enough to make even slight changes.
Yes we are always affecting others, even when we don’t notice it.
You have done your part, and you care. There is nothing more. After this things will work out as they will. Unfortunately when you are overwhelmed, lifestyle changes can be impossible. But you have planted the seed.
Yup, all you can do is plant seeds. We will see.
I've been there and I know what it is when doctors put diagnosis. I know that body can fully recover without pills and there are so many alternative ways to do so. Your friend has a long way to go. Sometimes we cannot see the real situation and all we want is to get the fastest and easiest solution only to feel better. That's how I have undergone unnecessary surgery. I wish there was someone to give me a hand and show me the right way at that time. Deep within myself, I knew that I can recover if I change my unhealthy lifestyle, but at that time I was too scared and insecure to trust my inner voice instead of doctors' voice.
My body had to really shout out me in a way that it was undeniable for me to start listening. The doctors were totally useless, and I gave them more than a few chances. I don’t want to think about how much money was wasted, but nothing is truly wasted. I went to go look for your posts...seems you don’t post often, tell me when you do!
Take what you have learned here, and magnify it by 10, or even 100.
If you start to get the law of attraction to work for you, then you will start noticing EVERYONE attracting all kinds of bad things to their lives. And talking to those people usually ends up with them flat denying that they are doing what they are doing.
Medical intuitives often just look at people and can see what is ailing them. And, like you said, most of it is bad nutrition (the foundation), which stems from bad emotions and thoughts (but "medical science" is convinced that those have nothing to do with health) At the end, you know what is wrong, and the pathway to getting better, but its too hard for them to do, because they have to keep working to afford the medicine (which is killing them)
I wonder how everyone looked to Jesus?
It’s crazy how conflicting emotions can manifest. Things are connected on so many levels. They influence future emotions, health, and decision making and create a kind of feedback loop that amazing goes totally unnoticed by all those at the fringes of society, like us....crazy world haha
Yeh sadly living a consciously healthy lifestyle (whatever that ends up translating into for you) is much harder work than swallowing some pills and hoping that it's the right kind that will fix whatever else problems are there :<
It’s a pretty convenient business model I guess...
Indeed. Although from the viewpoint of a conscientious health professional it's gotta be pretty heartbreaking to explain to your patient what they need to do to sort their health out but that all sounds like way too much hard work and they just want a magical pill to make it all better and if you won't provide them with one well then they'll just go to someone else.
I remember reading (fairly recently even, I just don't file things these days unless they're directly relevant to something I'm doing!) something about the psychological shifts that can happen as soon as someone becomes a "patient" with a "condition" where they seem to decide that they're helpless and at the mercy of whatever it is they've got rather than actively trying to fix/work around it.
Only so much you can do anyway :)
You've absolutely done your best to salvage the situation for her and that's really commendable. The thing with us humans is we tend to trust in some "titled" authority that the next neighbour who might just possess the secret to living awesomely. Not to even talk of our love for the easy way out.
Yup, I’ve thought about playing up the “guru” or “teacher” or “healer” role, but I’d much rather teach people to learn from more than just teachers,
That's the best part. Getting someone to learn from one. But only the people who have an opened mind to try out new things would understand.
Your idea is very good and really helped me out.steem on......enjoy!!!!
I understand you mate.
All you can do now is pray that she'll be fine. I agree, sometimes people just don't hear, look for easy ways and don't want to change themselves, so pain and suffering come...