I can live a totally normal life and do everything I want to do just as long as I take my medication. My body will give me signals if it gets weak or fatigued, so I know when I need to take a break.
I was diagnosed with lupus, and I've been through chemotherapy.
I'm fine, but I'm bipolar. I'm on seven medications, and I take medication three times a day. This constantly puts me in touch with the illness I have. I'm never quite allowed to be free of that for a day. It's like being a diabetic.
Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.
The only medication that I am on, I am on asthma, and I have had that since I was a child. That's just a normal use.
I've had tendinitis since college.
There is still no cure for the common birthday.
I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.
We used to have to arrange things around the dialysis. I would have to plan where to play so I could be back in time, and couldn't go too far.
For a long time, they thought I had lupus, then they thought I had something else. Finally, when I couldn't walk, they did a spinal tap and conclusively diagnosed me with M.S.
I've had 36 orthopedic operations, have two fused ankles, my knees, hands and wrists don't work, I now have a fused spine, other than that, everything is great.
Rheumatoid arthritis generally happens when your immune system attacks your joints, but I've had it attack my iris.
Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.
Growing up I always knew I had a deviated septum on the right side of my nose, which caused trouble breathing. The older I got, the worse it got.
The reasons asthma doesn't affect my work or play is that I had accurate diagnostics and follow treatment regimens closely. It's when someone thinks they're fine and that they don't need help that they usually get in trouble.
My parents instilled in me a sense of self that I was more than just a diagnosis or a condition.
For like a year, even after I retired, my ear would just bleed. There was just some scar tissue on it that tore open so many times that it just started bleeding all the time. It's rough on the wife, she has to keep washing the sheets again and again.
In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS rendered a chronic condition.
Even now with the operation, with the damage done, my ankle probably is never going to be back to 100 per cent.
I suffered from asthma when I was a kid.
I've had cumulative concussions and realized that's something you carry with you.
It was a real rough year and a half. I was getting 80 shots every four weeks.
I've been operated on 13 times.
I struggle with candida - usually it manifests on the skin and can be so pesty, painful, and irritating! It also feeds off sugar and gluten and is nearly impossible to rid yourself of.
And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.
