what to expect when you are diagnosed with a chronic illness

image by mike marrah

Expect anguish, anticipation, acupuncture, and acceptance. Expect advice and art. Expect boredom, beginnings, blossoming, and baths. Expect cats, craniosacral therapy, creativity, and changes. Expect denial, desire, dust build-up, and doctors. Expect disillusionment and despair; disability lawsuits, days in bed, and days without showers. Expect endings, envy, excitement, and energy healing. Expect exercise constraints.

Expect fatigue and forgetting. Expect financial concerns, Facebook, and food restrictions. Expect grace, gifts, grief, and God. Expect homeopathy, horses, hoping, and hammocks. Expect insight, insomnia, and impact on your marriage. Expect inconsistency.

Expect joy. Expect kindness. Expect liberation, listlessness, loss, and love. Expect limitation. Expect life.

Expect mystery, meditation, mistakes, and medicine. Expect Netflix, new friends, new hobbies, and naps. Expect overdoing, obsessive thinking, online classes, and openings. Expect possibility, potency, prayer, and pain. Expect platitudes.

Expect quiet. Expect questions. Expect relapse, recovery, regret, and release; resistance, recommendations, rest, and resilience.

Expect shower chairs, suicidal ideation, supplements, stories, and stillness. Expect sketchbooks. Expect simplification. Expect tenderness, terror, and turmoil. Expect tears, travel issues, tests, and timers.

Expected unwanted advice, unmade beds, undone laundry, and unwashed hair.

Expect visits. Expect verve. Expect writing, waiting, wondering, and wishing. Expect walks. Expect wheelchairs.

Expect Xanadu-like fantasies and reminiscences. Expect yourself, at your best and worst. Expect zillions of moments you never could have imagined.

[inspired by “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” by Katie Manning].