Chronic Illness Quotes

“Mental illness

People assume you aren’t sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you’re hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren’t ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won’t solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works.”
― Emm Roy, The First Step

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”
― Joseph Conrad

“She has fought many wars, most internal. The ones that you battle alone, for this, she is remarkable. She is a survivor.”
― Nikki Rowe

“Miraculously recover or die. That's the extent of our cultural bandwidth for chronic illness.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“We would not be able to impact future generations if family was not one of our top priorities.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“God has been there with us every step of the way.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“I encourage readers recovering from a kidney transplant to heed the advice of their medical practitioners.”
― Gregory S. Works, Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation

“Having a chronic illness, Molly thought, was like being invaded. Her grandmother back in Michigan used to tell about the day one of their cows got loose and wandered into the parlor, and the awful time they had getting her out. That was exactly what Molly's arthritis was like: as if some big old cow had got into her house and wouldn't go away. It just sat there, taking up space in her life and making everything more difficult, mooing loudly from time to time and making cow pies, and all she could do really was edge around it and put up with it.

When other people first became aware of the cow, they expressed concern and anxiety. They suggested strategies for getting the animal out of Molly's parlor: remedies and doctors and procedures, some mainstream and some New Age. They related anecdotes of friends who had removed their own cows in one way or another. But after a while they had exhausted their suggestions. Then they usually began to pretend that the cow wasn't there, and they preferred for Molly to go along with the pretense.”
― Alison Lurie, The Last Resort

“I often wished that more people understood the invisible side of things. Even the people who seemed to understand, didn't really.”
― Jennifer Starzec, Determination

“If I only could explain
How much I miss
that precious moment
when I was free
from the shackles of chronic pain.”
― Jenni Johanna Toivonen

“People who don't see you every day have a hard time understanding how on some days--good days--you can run three miles, but can barely walk across the parking lot on other days,' [my mom] said quietly.”
― Jennifer Starzec, Determination

“That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.”
― Jessica Verdi, My Life After Now

“You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.”
― Piper Kerman

“All parents set out with expectations, hopes and dreams for their child. When a child is diagnosed with a health problem, these aspirations are altered. While one parent is hoping to see their child graduate from university, another is praying that they can live pain free”
― Sharon Dempsey, Extreme Parenting: Parenting Your Child with a Chronic Illness

“Surrender is an incredibly difficult topic in light of chronic illness, because loss is often continued and sustained.”
― Cindee Snider Re, Finding Purpose: Rediscovering Meaning in a Life with Chronic Illness

“Courage wasn't only fighting your circumstances; sometimes making peace with your circumstances required more courage.”
― Sonali Dev, A Distant Heart

“It got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn't do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“Because doctors can’t name the illness, everyone—the patient's family, friends, health insurance, and in many cases the patient—comes to think of the patient as not really sick and not really suffering. What the patient comes to require in these circumstances, in the absence of help, are facts—tests and studies that show that they might “in fact” have something.”
― Joseph Dumit

“Self-care has become a new priority – the revelation that it’s perfectly permissible to listen to your body and do what it needs.”
― Frances Ryan

“Over the years I have developed and employed a variety of such coping mechanisms, mostly focusing around a philosophy I call, “Live Because.”

“Live Because” is in contrast to what I’ve termed “Live Despite,” which is the idea that people can live rich, full lives in spite of their physical or emotional barriers. “Live Because” takes this a step further by suggesting that in many cases, patients can live a more fulfilling life with their illness than they could ever have done without it.

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome has transformed me from a frequently petty and self-absorbed person into the person I am today (still somewhat self-absorbed, but a lot less petty, and with a clearly defined purpose of alleviating whatever suffering I can). I am better because of my illness, and not just in spite of it.

But this process was, and still is, a journey. Chronic illness is nearly always accompanied by depression, and the need to constantly remain one step ahead of my illness has left me fearful and exhausted. I could never go through this alone...

A part of me will always be angry; such is the process of mourning the pieces of oneself that are lost to chronic disease. I have learned to accept the duality of being bitter and at peace; ignorant and enlightened... while still laying a foundation of hope for the possibility that I can still realize my personal dreams and ambitions, even if not in the exact ways I had expected.”
― Michael Bihovsky

“Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The pain was creeping in her hands again, and there was a new place. Her right hip ached angrily when she moved. She thought: So the pain will move in towards the center, and sooner or later all the pains will meet … and join, like rats in a clot.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And it’s not lost to me in all of this that he would be perfectly fine dating a girl using a cane or a crutch or a wheelchair. And I realize that shouldn’t be something noteworthy, that any decent guy should be fine with that, especially one with a chronic illness, but…the world is not exactly teeming with decent guys, and here is one right here, and he loves me. And if his hip stopped working in the middle of the street, I would carry him, somehow. I’d find a way.”
― Hannah Moskowitz, Sick Kids in Love

“The people in my life found spaces to rest while navigating a racist culture, and they worked themselves into a deadly grind cycle to survive. They straddled the lines between exhaustion and always thriving. They moved mountains with their faith alone and created pathways for invention that I am still uncovering. They resisted every moment by existing in a world that was not welcoming or caring.”
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

“When I look in the mirror, I don't see a body slimmed through strict dieting and weight loss. I see a body that's weary, that's battered, that has been through absolute hell. I see a body that's resilient and has gone through the wringer to keep me alive. None of what I've endured matters in this unwinnable scheme: I am thinner, and therefore everything I've experienced to get here is secondary.”
― Evette Dionne, Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul

“Vex closed his eyes.. Healing his Shaking Sickness wasn't the only reason he missed Lu, and he hated that he had to tell himself that not to feel selfish. As if he needed more reasons to be mad at his body.

It isn't fair, he'd wanted to scream so many times. The rational part of him knew it wasn't his body's fault, but the rest of him hated this vessel he was trapped it.

This scarred, shaky, dying vessel.”
― Sara Raasch, These Divided Shores

“There's nothing wrong with wanting less pain or a different experience of it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to transform generations of passed down trauma. But, what gets more complicated is when those desires bleed into the ableist model of cure that's the only model most of us have for having more ease and less pain. That model and its harsh binary of successful and fixed or broken and fucked, is part of what contributes to suicidality and struggle in long-term survivors.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Watching other people walk never used to amaze me, but now it does. It's so effortless for normal people, with all their body parts moving in perfect harmony. I watch a woman rise from a bus stop bench, effortlessly. Her brain just tells her muscles to engage and up she goes. I can barely remember it being that way for me. Now every movement's a struggle.”
― Karol Ruth Silverstein, Cursed

“What more can the poem do? O Love, did you know that Czeslaw Milosz was right when he argued ‘What is poetry that cannot save nations or people?’ You are my nation. I only wanted to write poems to save you.”
― Sean Thomas Dougherty, Death Prefers the Minor Keys

“And while my illnesses don’t define me, they are a part of me. They have shaped me into the person I am today. Every decision I make includes them.”
― Brooke Gilbert, The Irish Fall