Musings on My Personification of Arthur

I have often said over the last few years that I feel grateful for being sick since childhood. I don’t remember living really without the limitations that I have grown up with, even though they do change enough to irritate beyond belief. I have multiple chronic diseases but my fibro is currently the worst offender now that my SJIA is mostly under control.

That brings its own challenges, though, like feeling that I’ve lost a huge part of me. Arthur, as I’ve always called my SJIA, was much like a twin. There is an emptiness that comes when the thing you’re closest to is gone, especially when you have a tendency to personify it.

There is a mix of joy for some semblance of pain relief, sorrow that he’s not around, and guilt that I’m doing so well while children I know have been in and out of the hospital seriously ill and fighting for their lives.

If Arthur had come along later than kindergarten, would I feel differently about him? If I grew up in a home without abuse, would I have gotten so attached to him, to that familiar pain?

I think that I clung to Arthur and used the physical pain as a distraction from my emotional and mental distress from my childhood. Another child in a similar situation may go to a friend’s house as a source of respite, but I didn’t have friends. I was basically not allowed to have them because I could share something that happened and I’d be taken away from my mother.

That threat was always there.

Arthur was that escape for me. Stress and emotional distress bring on flares so it was easy for me to be distracted, to escape into the pain that was most comfortable to feel because I didn’t know different.

I did know that my household was awful, that this was not how things were supposed to be, but I didn’t know a life without Arthur.