I am NOT an 83 year old woman…

I hear these words coming out of my mouth:  “Oh it’s just the microvascular angina, hypothyroidism and the reynaud’s syndrome….”  I think: Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!! You are not an 83 year old woman, just say you’re ‘fine’!  When someone asks you how you are, JUST SAY FINE!!!    Nobody wants to hear it.  Nobody wants your torrent of symptoms and self-diagnoses lobbed at them like a grenade full of energy-sucking leeches.  SHUT THE HELL UP!!! 

Problem is, people keep saying “How are you?  Are you okay?  You’re looking a little green.”  ‘Cause right now?  I look like utter crap.  Lay me next to a cadaver and we’d have the same skin tone.  Hence my honest reassurance to folks by poo-pooing all my many symptoms.  “Nothing to worry about… I’ve got my nitro spray… yadda yadda, sick speak, sick speak.”  You can see when their eyes glaze over at the ‘too much information.”  It’s pretty much the same time that the word microvascular leaves my lips… annnnnnnnnd…. they’re… done.  Because people don’t want you to be honest.  They want you to lie, like everyone else does, and just be FINE. 
 
So this is me, taking a different tack.  I will slather on the makeup – add some blush to take away the pallor, smile and say “I’m well, how are you?”   Cause I’m NOT 83  and won’t be for another 39 years.  And even when I am 83, I don’t want to be that person who defines themselves by their maladies.   My Granny lived to be 103 years old and I never once heard her complain.  When she was 100 she was knitting knee blankets for the ‘old folks.’  She was mostly blind and mostly deaf and dropped a few stitches in those knee blankets, and they are the most BEAUTIFUL knee blankets in the world!    And when I get cold for absolutely no reason in our 20 c house because of my weird-ass health crap, I can wear one of those blankets around my shoulders, put on a hat and a scarf, shut the hell up and channel my Granny.

The most beautiful slipped stitch I’ve EVER seen!

There’s a frickin’ blue sky out there today and I’m going to catch some of those rays.  Cause I know for damn sure that fresh air helps EVERYTHING and that all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other and I am determined to do just that.