A surprise string of 3 week-long hospital stints for a perforated bowel, followed by 2 months of antibiotics and a low fiber/residue diet and feeling like my stamina was absolutely destroyed. Happened last year, 30something male without any previous remarkable medical history.

My mom, driving me home from the hospital where I had just finished a stay for a large abscess, started telling me how my problem was I was "too anxious" and really should try prozac. Huh? No, my problem is there's an avocado-sized sac of pus in my insides that could have exploded and killed me. That seemed to be the pretty consistent consensus from the doctors who just spent a week treating me with antibiotics and the surgeons who poked me every day to make sure I didn't need emergency surgery and the interventional radiologist who inserted a drain into my belly.

There was another point where I physically couldn't walk a single block, I couldn't eat anything (on doctors orders) other than popsicles and pudding and ensure, was losing a pound per day, and had to sleep for 2-3 hours for every hour that I was awake. And one of my close friend's response was "your problem is you're eating crappy food, what if you just had a nice big salad?" It was infuriating for its tone deafness: the problem was not the crappy food I was eating, it was the hole in my colon that had caused sepsis; the doctors were clear that eating any fiber could make everything worse and I needed to stay on a super low fiber diet until the perforation and fistula resolved.

Anyway, the whole thing was a wake-up call in multiple senses. I need to take better are care of myself. I need to do things that I love while I'm able to do them, because that little glimpse at living with illness was pretty terrifying. When I have issues, I need to be judicious with what and to whom I disclose (including updating my emergency contact information to not be my mom).

My favorite quote that I heard during that ordeal was "health is a crown only the sick can see." I feel really lucky that my situation largely resolved, and that having been very sick has left me with the ability to recognize the privilege of health.

It's definitely changed how I think about people living with chronic illness-- not that I thought they were "just anxious" or "just need to eat a big salad" before, but recognizing that their struggle is so multifaceted. It's feeling physically unwell in ways you can't imagine (not just feeling sleepy, but it's like your body giving you a 5 minute warning that we're going down for a nap whether you like it or not). It's struggling with a broken healthcare system that's not designed to help you and requires you to be your own advocate (when admitted for sepsis, they forgot to order antibiotics for me after my first round in the ER, so I became septic again on the floor, and had to ask multiple times when my next round of antibiotics were; the hospital maintains that was appropriate care). It's navigating your own relationships where people dispense unsolicited and demeaning advice while also sometimes distancing themselves from you. It's horrible.

So, stay healthy and avoid getting sick as best you can, identify and build a support network, and be kind and gentle and inclusive with your friends that are sick-- someday that will be you.