my 23 yr old sister has been desperately ill since april and it’s destroying our family

she’s so young. she’s recently married. she is suffering immensely and i’ve never been more worried. if i’ve hit my stress limit and _i’m_a shadow of my former self, i can’t even begin to fathom how she’s feeling. how my mom is feeling.

she is a T1 diabetic, diagnosed at 16. i won’t go into family dynamic stuff here, but due to the way we were raised she has a lot of body image issues and has struggled with disordered eating since she was a teenager. after becoming diabetic, this developed into diabulimia. she has always desperately wanted to be healthy, to take care of her diabetes, to be happy in her own skin, but her brain is actively fighting against her in nearly every way. because of all of this she is what they call “diabetes non-compliant.”

the consequences have started to catch up and things have been escalating rapidly.

she got a staph infection around the end of march. at the time, all we knew was that it was a weird small cyst on her head. it went away, so we thought nothing of it. but what was actually happening was the staph infection was spreading. had her diabetes been under control and her immune system strong enough to fight it, it would have cleared up a long long time ago. but because that’s not reality, and because bacteria loves sugar, the infection was just getting stronger.

it spread through her body and turned into a UTI. again, at this point we had no way of connecting the dots.

then she started feeling very weak, feverish, just generally unwell. it was persistent and never ending, it got to a point she couldn’t leave the house or even shower. she lives almost an hour away from me and further from our mom, so by the time we knew about a lot of this stuff things were already way out of control. i blame my brother in law somewhat for not realizing something was wrong sooner, but i genuinely think he just couldn’t get through to her and had no idea it was serious enough to force an ultimatum on her until it was too late.

in early june, we went out to a family dinner. i noticed she was having a very difficult time walking and looked like a ghost. i immediately felt sick to my stomach and when i made eye contact with my mom i felt both of our hearts sink. my sister said she was having a lot of nerve pain. she kept being very dismissive about how concerning it was, and that was the point we all kind of collectively realized this was an emergency.

a day later they took her to the hospital. the infection had made it to her blood and she was septic. it was the worst week of my entire life. we were told that there was a strong chance the infection made it to her heart valves, and if it did, that meant emergency heart surgery. luckily that wasn’t the case, but it was still a very very close call and she wasn’t out of the woods for a while. they discharged her a little over a week later. she has been watching her diabetes like a hawk ever since, with the full support of her husband, lesson learned in the most painful way possible.

she has had to be connected to an IV and oxygen tank ever since and will be for about another week. i have so desperately wanted to believe this is all behind us, but it isn’t. it isn’t at all. the symptoms are never the same, but something always keeps happening. she never “got better,” she has truly not felt a moment of peace in her life since april and has been in constant pain for different reasons.

she had to go back to the hospital very quickly after being discharged because she was having intense pain, it could have been a pulmonary embolism, so she was at the ER with my mom until 4am when they confirmed she was okay. she has started having intense nerve pain again throughout her body. just last night she had to go to the hospital again because her heart rate was at 150 and they couldn’t get it to go down for hours. it only went down after they gave her a percocet for her pain. her pain is so bad it’s driving up her heart rate. we never have answers for why she’s still sick, why she’s not getting better, what’s wrong with her. they have run a million tests. she had low potassium and was dehydrated, but that is the only thing they could find wrong, and that revelation has fixed absolutely nothing.

i have never been more terrified for my sister or anyone in my life. any time i see her, she’s there physically, but somewhere far away mentally. she calls my mom in hysterics every day unable to cope with what’s happening. she and her husband are exhausted beyond words. she is severely depressed and my mom and i are worried she’s suicidal. she’s starting antidepressants, they’re giving her trazodone for sleep, and they gave her some percocets for the pain for now. she’s all kinds of drugged up and it’s better than her being so actively in pain all the time, but she’s just not here anymore and my beautiful young sister is withering away in front of me.

my family desperately needs answers and solutions and that’s not what we’re getting. my mind has been racing through all the worst possibilities. i love my sister more than i could ever express. she and i have been through hell together. we weren’t always close, so the strong friendship we’ve been able to build is one of the most important things in my life. the trauma this will place on her after everything else she’s been through in her life is unfair. she has her whole future ahead of her.

i just want this nightmare to end.

Submitted July 23, 2022 at 11:26AM by aya_kinoko https://ift.tt/z9gMO5R