Prone to sickness

I got the chicken pox when I was in 3rd grade (1987), I can't remember if it started out as scarlatina or turned into scarlatina, but I do remember I had painful little blisters all over my body for a month. The doctors had to remove a blister from my skin to test it because it didn't look like chicken pox at all, looked like some kind of plague.  I was miserable and had to take yucky medicine, my mom and dad couldn't hold or hug me because everywhere on my skin it hurt to touch, and the neighbor girls would try to look at me in the window because I was a monstrous sight. I thought I was going to die! I still have visible and mental scars from this sickness.  The doctors all told my parents to take a picture of me because they had never seen anything like it, but I wouldn't allow it, and my parents kindly respected that, and now I regret it because I want to see what the medical anomaly of the varicella virus looked like.

Here are a couple journal entries that illustrate that when I got sick, I REALLY got sick.

Oct 4 1993

I have been deathly ill. Strep is a very bad sickness to have, excruciating pain and makes you do weird things. Its going to be awful trying to make up all the school I'm missing. But school is such a small piece of my life. Its strange how a couple of days could seem so important. I'm in agony. I can't concentrate.

Dec 15, 1993

Tomorrow can I please get better? I've missed school too much. Why do I get sick so easy?  I don't know whether or not to go, as soon as I do something (walking too fast, holding the baby,) I get a stomach ache and start coughing and I have a sines infection so my nose seems to produce overtime on snot! I wish I didn't have a nose. At this point you'd rather look like an alien too. I have been sick for 4 days. A cold on top of sinus infection on top of the flu on top of bronchitis. 

When I got sick it lasted a LONG time, but I had a high pain tolerance so I would try to keep doing things despite whatever ailment I had. I ate too much refined sugar all the time and was small and frail and hardly ever exercised, but I had no idea that was contributing to the problem. In my senior year of high school I remember the last two months of the school year, April - May, I was coughing continuously day and night, but I didn't stay home from school, in fact I went to the Senior Prom with a major headache and congestion. I made my friends miserable at our sleep overs because I couldn't stop coughing at night. My mom finally broke down and took me to the doctor and sure enough I had bronchitis again. It just amazes me how long it took to get over things, at the time I didn't know there was any abnormality with it. 

In college I had less problems with strep and bronchitis, but I had more problems with migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, and colds/sinus infections. Sometimes they got severe enough to keep me home in bed, (during a college class I had to run out and fainted in the bathroom due to a painful stool blockage) but I usually pushed through and did my schooling/work in spite of it.  When married I continued with the head aches, seemingly due to stress or menstruation, but what really got to me from age 23 -30 was depression.  When I was pregnant I was somehow free of depression but my immune system took a vacation for 9 months and I got every sickness you can think of; yeast infections, urinary tract infections, colds, stomach flu, laryngitis, diarrhea, strep, etc.  Fun fun times. After I recovered from depression, which took from 2003-2008, my body started responding to stress in different ways, with anxiety, insomnia and still the headaches, but I did every mental health coping strategy possible while going back to school and being trained as a therapist you could think of so I functioned pretty well. I felt mentally stable enough to go to graduate school in 2009, it was a rocky road but not too bad as far as illness goes. But 3 weeks after I graduated I started having chronic illness symptoms such as dizzy spells, fatigue, heart racing, and a weird head pressure I'd never experienced. And they didn't go away for three months.

I just seemed prone to sickness.