Chronically Me

For most of my life, I thought headaches were just a normal inconvenience. Throughout middle school and early high school, I would often come home after long days of staring at screens with bad head pain. It was annoying, but manageable. I never imagined that a few years later, migraines would completely take over my life. Everything shifted in the summer of 2024. I was doing a stressful CIT overnight camp program, and looking back, I truly believe that that stress triggered the start of my...

My name is Amanda and I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, sjogrens, and fibromyalgia.  Life knocked me down early. My chronic illness symptoms started at just 17 years old in the middle of my senior year of high school. I went from playing soccer and cheerleading, to being curled into a ball crying in pain.  My symptoms were very vague and only happened occasionally at first, until it became a daily struggle of joint pain, severe fatigue, muscle and bone pain, and a burning skin pain that...

When I was twelve years old, I began experiencing severe stomach pain and started throwing up everything I ate or drank. I couldn’t sleep, and the pain was constant. One day it became so unbearable that I finally convinced my parents to take me to the emergency room. The doctors believed it was my appendix and scheduled me for an appendectomy the next day. I hoped the surgery would finally make me feel better. The surgery itself went well. My appendix was removed, but it wasn’t inflamed, and...