By Readers of The Sun Magazine — 2003
I live in a culture that’s only too eager to court my vanity.
Read on www.thesunmagazine.org
CLEAR ALL
Individuals with disabilities are at a greater risk of experiencing fatigue than the general population, and this risk increases with age.
As a woman with a physical disability, I am usually glaringly aware of how my body is the polar opposite of what is deemed the norm.
I no longer care about my body being perfect. It’s taken a long time to get here, but I’ve realized my body has been through too much to spend time and energy caring about losing that extra 10 pounds or minimizing my scars.
After 15 years of chronic illness and even after writing a book titled How to Be Sick, I still can feel sick of being sick. (When I use the word “sick,” I’m including chronic pain.) If you’re as intimately familiar as I am with sick of being sick, you know how unpleasant it feels.
To celebrate the release of my new book, How To Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness: A Mindful Guide, I’ve made a list of 20 tips to help with the health challenges all us face at one time or another in life.
A calm mind and even temper can help make peace with life’s difficulties.
1
I’ve been disabled and intensely ill with the degenerative neuro-immuno illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (formerly known by the misnomer “chronic fatigue syndrome”) for 30 years.
A panel of experts has released guidelines stating that regular exercise can help prevent cancer as well as help people undergoing cancer treatment.
Understanding the patterns of reaction to a prolonged illness with perhaps years of remission and a significant chance of being cured will help you put your emotional survival in focus while your doctor concentrates on your physical survival.
After treatment ends, one of the most common concerns survivors have is that the cancer will come back. The fear of recurrence is very real and entirely normal. Although you cannot control whether the cancer returns, you can control how much the fear of recurrence affects your life.