This current “normal” is what it’s like to actually reside inside the mind and heart of an immunocompromised patient. People standing too close to us in public. Now you see why we get cranky about it. Why we glare when you stick your arms and hands in our faces to grab something or when you hog the fucking aisle so that we can’t avoid breathing you when we finally have the energy to run errands. We’ve known how to open doors using different contact methods,  to avoid pain and exposure. 

Your germs have never been safe for us. Your colds. Your flu. Your oh so minor symptoms that you bring to work. Your fear of vaccinations. Your fear of the immune response kicking in. Your inability to flush the fucking toilet completely or even wash hands thoroughly. Crowding around us because you want in through the doors, buildings, or transportation.  Being depressed and disappointed for missing out on things because of our conditions,  medications,  and need for rest and recovery. 

This current reality? This is what we always have to think about, how we’ve lived, this entire time that we have carried our conditions within us. Always thinking ahead of exposure too. Because our lives, our health, our immunity has always been at risk.  Our treatments put us at further risk. You think you’re afraid of getting sick and dying now? Where have you been?

This normal is not new to us, at all. You think you’re tired, especially in coping with these changes to a new normal now? Try doing it for years. Fucking decades. And there’s no cure. No fucking cure for so many of us. All we can do is wait, rest, and try to get through the next day because that new normal isn’t going anywhere. Or hope that a ne medication will make a difference.  But they still have side effects.

Everyone’s treatment and response is different.  You can see the drug companies try to sell us the cure of a Utopian dreamland in which we can once again grasp that normal self who existed before crippling disease. But it’s a lie. A damned illusion.

Nothing will be the same, ever again. There will be another new normal. Accept it. This world can only carry us forward so much before it’s too late for to halt the damage of our social inflammation. We’ve been sick for so long, we don’t even recognize the truth in the mirror. The human disease has always been there. Nothing will get better for us if we continue to ignore the symptoms. You can try to fight it all you want. Believe me, all of us immunocompromised patients have been there. But it won’t cure anything. Now do you understand what it’s like to ache constantly and want to live life like you used to? But yet, you can’t.