Last week on the facebook page Sickle Cell Warriors, I posted the following question:
“I’ve learned, through a lifetime of Sickle Cell pain, how to disconnect myself from that pain to a large degree. In some ways I feel as though I have applied that ability to emotional pain. Does anyone else feel as though Sickle Cell has caused you to put an emotional barrier, thus making it difficult to connect with others?”
I was very surprised by the response; I received more than a hundred likes and nearly forty comments in less than twenty-four hours. Every single person who wrote a reply felt as I did. The emotional struggle of living with Sickle Cell—or any chronic illness for that matter—has far more reaching consequences than we sometimes realize.
One young man said he has a hard time asking girls out on dates because he feels he can’t get close to them. One woman wrote, when she has to go to the ER, she tells her family to leave her at the door and go home; when coping with pain, it’s too difficult for her to have family around. Some feel they receive little or no sympathy from loved ones, which naturally builds walls around those relationships.
From a lifetime of complications, pain, and hospitalizations, some have difficulty recognizing or having sympathy for other people’s pain. Because no one understands their situation, some feel as though people won’t/can’t love them enough to stick by them during the hard times.
One woman wrote, “As a mother of a child with Sickle cell, is there something I can do to prevent him from developing that wall? What could your parents have done differently?”
As I’ve thought about this subject, I realize I can’t briefly answer this in one post. I think it best to break the topic up into several smaller ones. I feel this topic is a very important one and I want to come at it from a few different angles.
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