1. The Weird Symptom Stage. You have weird symptoms but you don’t know yet that what you are experiencing isn’t normal. For me this stage lasted through most of adolescence and into early adulthood. It’s hard sometimes to recognize things as symptoms since you’ve never experienced life in any other body. How do I know what is normal when I have a sample size of one?
2. Seeking A Diagnosis Stage. In this stage you are aware that something isn’t right with your body and you are trying to figure out what that is. Most of us are told its all in our heads or its just stress or other nonsense like that at some point in this phase. It takes a lot of tries to find doctors who both believe you that something is wrong and have the knowledge to figure out what it is.
3. Trying Various Treatments Stage. Here you are trying all the different treatment options until you find the things that help you. Many chronic conditions do not have a set treatment and you can only find help for the symptoms. This can be a slow process as you have to take on each symptom one at a time and it can often be difficult to figure out which symptoms are actually disrupting your life the most. Even once you identify the treatments that help with various things you still need to figure out how those treatments will interact with each other. For instance, what helps one thing may make another thing worse.
4. Reprieve From The Worst Of It Stage. In this stage you figure out the things you need to help you and you are doing them. You’ve been doing them, sometimes for years before you get to this stage. You finally have some relief for your symptoms. You aren’t normal but you are well enough that your life is sustainable as it is. You don’t spend all your free time going to doctors appointments anymore. You can still try new treatments in this stage but you can do so on your own terms and in your own time since your symptoms are no longer at a critical state.
5. Acute Problems Come Up Stage. Here is where some acute problem pops up and sets you back. You go through a smaller process of diagnosing and treating the acute problem but you inevitably end up having to compromise on your chronic treatments to make it all work. There are bumps along the way to recovery. At the end of this stage you need to work very hard to get back to where you were in stage 4.
6. Repeat stages 4 and 5 indefinitely until a cure is found or you die.
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