After a bad day – as today has been – as a sufferer of a chronic pain-type illness, I now sympathise with those who have had the good day-bad day, seesaw. Such health erraticism is mostly unfathomable to non-sufferers.
Equal with the bad days – and the bad days can be grim – is knowing the sheer boredom it elicits in the listener when they ask you: “How are you.” When you reply on the phone, you can usually hear the listener reach for their device, for anything – and they’re right to be bored: it’s is boring. Acute symptoms garner all the sympathy. Those of us with chronic conditions are often regarded as malingerers, misleaders, wimps. We are not.
