Transform Your Chronic Life: You CAN Be Happy in Spite of Chronic Illness

By Wendy Burnett

Although millions of people around the world live with chronic illness, few share their experience publicly for fear of the effect it will have on their employability. Wendy shares her own experience and the lessons it has taught her openly and honestly, providing both practical tips for reducing the physical and emotional stresses of living with chronic illnesses and the knowledge that you are not alone in your journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wendy Burnett
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301843107

Wendy Burnett

Wendy is a blogger, freelance writer, and health activist. She has been dealing with multiple chronic illnesses since her diagnosis with fibromyalgia and a rheumatoid-type arthritis in 1991, and has acquired various other diagnoses in the years since. Her experience with various treatment modalities, both within the framework of "traditional allopathic medicine," and outside that framework has provided a wide range of knowledge, as well as an ability to find alternatives where necessary.

Book preview

Transform Your Chronic Life:

You CAN Be Happy in Spite of Chronic Illness

Published by Wendy Burnett at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Wendy Burnett

Cover Design by Maggie Callahan

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please visit Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer

The author of this book is not a doctor, and nothing in this book should be construed as medical advice. Any treatments mentioned should be thoroughly researched and discussed with a qualified practitioner before being attempted. The author does not guarantee that any of the methods discussed will work for anyone except herself, and is not responsible for the outcome of the reader's decisions.

Table of Contents

Note from the Author

Introduction

What ONE Thing Can You Commit to Today to Improve Your Life?

Keep It Realistic

Pacing (or, How not to put yourself in bed for a week.)

Reframing Your Life

Allowing Yourself to Grieve Your Losses

Acceptance

Hope

Gratitude

Be Open to New Possibilities

Try One Thing at a Time (and give it plenty of time to have an effect)

Stress

Compassion & Connection

Spirituality

Disability

Doctors & Patients (Collaborative Partners or Adversaries?)

Final Notes: People who Inspire Me

About the Author

Connect with Wendy

Resources

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Note from the Author

Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be. ~ Wayne Dyer

Transformation is never easy, but it is possible. When I began this process several years ago, the only thing that changed about my life was the way I thought about it. I still lived in the same place, working at the same job that I hated as much as I ever did, and my fibromyalgia and fibrofog (a symptom that involves losing words, forgetting things while you're doing them, and not being able to think clearly,) still flared (a flare is a short-term intensification of symptoms) on a regular basis. I still struggle financially, I don't have insurance, and the only places I've gone in months are to work and to the grocery store.

Physically, my life is pretty much the same; but mentally, everything has changed. Chronic illness and the losses that go with it had stolen my hope and my happiness, and I was miserable. I spent most of my time either suicidal or severely depressed, and had resigned myself to the idea that my life would only get worse and worse until I couldn't bear it any longer and ended it all.

The rare moments when I could muster up the energy to do anything other than work and take care of what little I could manage to do at home were spent in a desperate online search for some way to make a few extra dollars.

That's how I started blogging, on one of those sites where they claim they'll pay you to blog. I call it a claim because it's set up so that unless you have massive amounts of traffic, you don't get a cent; and the only traffic that counts is new visits. (Plus, anything you publish on their site belongs to them, so if someone wants to republish it, they're the ones that get any royalties.) I never actually got paid a single penny, but that was the beginning of the journey for me.

I learned that I enjoyed writing, and that I was pretty good at it, too. I got positive comments from friends and strangers both; and moved to Wordpress where what I wrote would belong to me.

That blog opened up a whole new world for me, and I moved to a self-hosted blog (Transform Your Chronic Life) not long afterwards. I started looking for information to share, and the research I did led me to some alternative methods that helped me to feel a bit better. I also started looking for ways to make my blog better; and started reading about blogging, search engine optimization and getting more traffic. My research turned up all kinds of things, and I tried many of them. (Some of them actually worked, even though I did NOT expect them to.)

There have been a lot of failed experiments, like writing for a couple of content mills that never actually paid me anything; but even the failures have been productive. They've taught me about what does and doesn't work for me, and led