Never Knowing What to Expect in the Morning

Those of you with Lupus know what I’m talking about.

Do you ever go to bed at night, feeling tired but otherwise perfectly fine….then wake up in the morning with a terrible stomach ache, a splitting headache, paralyzing fatique (and not just the normal fatigue that some people get when they’ve just woken up…and will eventually fade away)?

I don’t get headaches too often, so I don’t worry about that too much. But today I woke up with a stomach ache and that general feeling of “unwellness”.

I woke up a couple of times at night, and that isn’t unusual for me. I felt fine then. But around 8am when I woke up, boy did I feel crummy. I was actually woken up by the sound of my father entering my bedroom with a tray of breakfast. My dad usually brings me breakfast on sunday mornings and I sincerely appreciate that and him. But THIS time, when you wake up with a stomach ache and are met with a tray full of oatmeal, toast, eggs….simply not what I wanted to see or smell. I choked down 2 of 4 slices of toast, a couple of bites of oatmeal, annd all of my tea. I quickly took my morning meds before a real feeling of nausea kicked in. I managed to keep all of the meds down and didn’t throw up.

One of the most frustrating things about Lupus (and many other diseases I’m sure) is the daily unpredictability of it. I must admit, every single day I have some degree of unwellness, be it fatugue, a stomach ache, etc. But some days are better than others. It makes it difficult to make plans because you never really know how you’re gonna feel 3 months from now, a month from now, a week from now…even a day from now.

I’m always singing my employer’s praises, and it’s definitely deserved. I couldn’t be more lucky to have a job that is so understanding of my illness. But one thing that always crosses my mind is my future career. My goal is to get into the Human Resources field. While there are several different jobs in HR, obviously one of them is interviewing job candidates. Can you imagine looking forward to an interview for a job you’ve always wanted…only to be called the day of the interview by someone in the company telling you your interview will be re-scheduled because the HR rep who’s supposed to interview you is ill. How crappy would that be?

The job I have now doesn’t really have any specific deadlines that I have to take into account when I enter the office, but my future job will. I haven’t decided if I actually want to get into the part of HR where you interview people since there are other areas too like payroll, benefits, creating job postings, checking references, putting together acceptance packages, etc. I just hate the idea of letting people down or missing deadlines because of my condition.

When I turned my laptop on this morning and logged onto facebook, it became clear to me that other people on my list with Lupus weren’t feeling 100% either.

One person’s facebook status was {insert name here} is so sick. I hate puking.

Another person’s name was {insert name here} feels like crap, freakin’ Lupus (shakes fist in the air).

I knew I didn’t feel well either, but I opted to make my facebook status say: Florence wishes there was an application to block people from inviting you to join applications. Not exactly discussing how I felt physically, but also stating something that annoys me. 🙂

As I’m used to, I picked myself up and did some math homework. If I never did homework when I wasn’t feeling I don’t think I’d ever do homework. But, as it usually does, that feeling of unwellness slowly faded away.

So I feel fine now, but I wonder what tomorrow will bring..