Dear past me,
It’s been one year today.
ONE. ENTIRE. YEAR.
Since you last had anaphylaxis.
Since you last lost your airway.
Since you last silently said your goodbyes.
Since survival finally turned into healing.
Xolair has saved your life!
I know you're lying in your hospital bed, with our team discussing this trial treatment as an attempt to stop our body attacking itself. You're completely numb. Our clinicians are discussing the major risks, the side effects, the long term complications, and you just silently nod, completely unphased. You're looking at our battered body, covered in excruciating hives, IV lines everywhere, pumping us with strong medications that are destroying our body to keep us alive. You're traumatised from continuously losing your airway, laying isolated in hospital. You're just waiting to die.
Nothing could be worse than this.
But I need you to hold onto hope to see the impossible become possible, because a year from now I promise you'll believe in miracles.
In a year you'll be dancing around, radiating pure happiness, and you'll realise that you made it. You’ll wake up in the morning and not be shocked you made it through the night. You’ll be working full time as a nurse again, instead of being a full time patient. You’ll be doing a Masters degree and your brain will actually function, and think, and remember! You’ll find your raw, authentic self and heal deeper than you thought was possible. You’ll fall in love, in so many ways. You’ll laugh uncontrollably and feel genuine joy again.
You’ll be living the future no one thought was possible.
Surviving is complicated though.
You'll have to somehow comprehend the reality of still being alive and you'll have to put your funeral plans to the back of your mind and you'll have to let go of the peace you felt when you accepted the inevitable which now isn't inevitable and you'll have to stop just existing and allow yourself to start living again and you'll have to make a new home in the person you'll become and you'll have to forgive yourself and be compassionate to the person you were when you took life and love for granted and you'll have to process the trauma and live with the flashbacks of your nightmare and simultaneously you'll have to dare to dream of a future and you'll have to endure the loneliness of returning to normal life when you've experienced the very opposite and you'll have to accept that your perspective of life has been irreversibly changed and most won't understand and you'll have to come to terms with how isolating and difficult to navigate that is and you'll have to question every single thing you thought you knew about yourself and about the world and about love and about life and you'll have to feel all of the emotions of relief and gratitude and euphoria and most of all you'll have to find comfort in the calm rather than finding it in the chaos.
And you'll have to remember to breathe through it all.
Healing is raw and messy and complicated. But you'll do it.
Miracles really can happen. One entire year.
We really did it. We survived.
Love present me x
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