Week 8, a letter.

For some reason, I feel the need to educate people on two things: 1) autoimmune diseases and 2) medical drugs. So, here is a letter to whoever will listen, whoever is interested in hearing what I have to say about what I go through everyday, and for whoever wants to hear about a battle I have been facing for over two years now with an "invisible" autoimmune disease.
First of all, I feel helpless. 
My own body is killing me. My own immune system decides to attack and to kill off its own blood cells. Do you know aggravating this is? I have three or more little bottles of blood taken from me every Tuesday at lunch time, just to tell me that my god damn blood counts are low. Every. Single. Time. Low blood counts can be dangerous, for example platelets (platelets clot your blood when you bleed), once they hit below 20, you can sneeze and haemorrhage on your brain. Want know the lowest mine have been? They have been 1. I have been covered in bruises to the point where the hospital called in police thinking that I have been abused by my parents because I looked so beat up. Then, there are my neutrophils which stop infections. Of course, since my are low, I get sick often and severely. At one point in time, I was hospitalized for a week because I had para influenza, influenza A, and pneumonia, and on top of that, I'm always sick with some little illness or another and I always have a cough. Last but not least, my last blood line which goes low, is my haemoglobin. Your haemoglobin is what brings oxygen throughout your body, and especially to your brain. I was hospitalized over a month and put on over 1000 mg of prednisone (a monstrous amount of steroids) because my haemoglobin hit below 30. I almost went into cardiac arrest several times because my heart was pumping trying to get oxygen through my body and nothing was happening because there was none in my body to be found, my brain was literally suffocating slowly.
I feel bitter and enraged.
To treat this stupid disease, I need to be put on steroids, and to be honest, I don't know which one I'd rather have to deal with. My life threatening stupid disease, or the side effects of the steroids. Believe it or not, but these drugs are torture. First of all, I feel paranoid all the time because of them, I feel like someone is watching me, I feel anxious and I feel like I always need to watch my back. I always feel bothered and agitated. I can never have a moments peace, I always feel like I need to be doing something, and if I can't be doing something, I feel like I'm going to explode with frustration, anger or agitation. Then, the weakness. Steroids break down your core muscles at an extreme rate. I feel so tired. My legs feel like weights and it is such a chore to even move. My back hurts and I feel so upset. I don't want to move any more, it is so hard to get up in the mornings knowing I have to make my feet touch the ground. Then this tightness on my chest is overwhelming, and the steroid coated tongue which makes everything taste worse, and then the steroid water retention which makes my face explode like an ugly chipmunk, and then having to look at myself in the dreadful mirror each morning and see what my own body is doing to my face and tearing apart my skin, and I'm just so mentally and physically drained. Oh, and on top of that, steroids make you hungry. Not the "oh I can eat another plate" hungry, its the "I need to eat everything in this entire household" gnawing hunger which gets so bad I start eating the insides of my damn lips. Every single moment, every single second, I feel like I can rip something or someone apart. I feel so agitated all the time, and this isn't me, this isn't the regular Cherish who loves to play video games, who loves to read and play ukulele, who loves to dance foolishly when no one is around, this is the steroid Cherish who is frenzied. This is the Cherish who wants to scream and ask whoever the hell made her what the hell they were thinking, and why the hell she deserves this. I feel like I need answers, but I'm never going to get them. This is who I am, this is the battle I have been going through for over the past two years, and the funny thing is, is that I'd do anything to be who I was before all this crap happened. I was just a regular teenage girl. I was pretty with blonde hair and a slim face, with about 40 less pounds. I didn't have these scars, these bloody ugly stretch marks. I was considered beautiful, I was on the volleyball team, I played basketball, I was in choir, I was happy with myself, It felt like I finally found myself, which is everyone's goal in life, and then this rare autoimmune disease hit me. It tore me apart, destroyed me mentally and physically, and left me in pieces.
I knew who I was before, but this glitch, this disease, this punishment, has changed everything and left me in an unknown land. The only thing I can thank it for is for giving me a new fire, a new spite, a new animosity, a new anger which I have never felt before. A new spark which I hold onto every night, wondering why the hell this happened to me, and how I can use it to help the world around me, and how I can help people like me.