Everything I Bought Yesterday To Feel Normal

Rachel Wendte
5 min readFeb 12, 2019

This cold weather is killing me not so softly, friends.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When it comes to having a disability, any sort of pain you have kind of gets lumped together with everyone else and what’s “normal” for your disability. Easily one of the top three frustrating things about having pain and fatigue with cerebral palsy is that doctors the world over will say this is a situation where “Everyone is different.” GROAN.

This blanket statement covers a lot, which I’m sure medical professionals appreciate. It means we can’t get mad (or as mad) if something doesn’t work. As a patient, it infuriates me. Not because I expect everything to work for me the way it does for other people, but when I hear things like “lots of people find this helpful” or “this has been really effective for your type of pain,” and it doesn’t work, I get so jealous. I’m not wishing for more discomfort, but it’d be cool if my pain matched up with a bunch of other people’s. And I’m sure plenty would say the same. Someone who even has similar pain to me could have a different kind of pain, but we feel those pains with similar severity. Talk about a headache. I also realize this can apply to a lot of other medical situations aside from CP, but I’m keenly aware of it in this case, of course.

“What kind of pain is it?” is one of the hardest questions to answer. I do think…

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Rachel Wendte

Arts & culture enthusiast who loves all things creative, media related, and cleverly debated. #UXDesigner and Tutor @CareerFoundry.