Quotes About Chronic Illness

#1. The Spoon Theory was created by a friend of mine, Christine Miserandino, to explain the limits you have when you live with chronic illness.

Jenny Lawson

#2. Miraculously recover or die. That's the extent of our cultural bandwidth for chronic illness.

S. Kelley Harrell

#3. The fork is your most powerful tool to change your health and the planet; food is the most powerful medicine to heal chronic illness.

Mark Hyman, M.D.

#4. Living in the past is like choosing to cling to a chronic illness.

Asa Don Brown

#5. I know terrorism is real. And I know fear of it distorts public judgment. Terrorism is like a chronic illness. We have to learn to contain it and live with it.

Yochai Benkler

#6. The challenges I have faced - among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother - are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.

Sonia Sotomayor

#7. That is what chronic illness is . . . a disconnect between what our souls can do and what our bodies can do.

Barbara Lieberman

#8. To me she was beautiful, this artist's model, this film extra, a woman who had been married three times. I think she would understand my chronic illness, my fatigue, and me. I think we would be best friends or pen pals.

Abigail George

#9. I learned the hard way how desperately primitive is the technology we have for monitoring the health of someone with a chronic illness.

Chris Toumazou

#10. It's been an incredible odyssey to make the journey from a vibrantly healthy person to someone with a chronic illness.

Karen Duffy

#11. They have been deprived nutritionally, or some illness has not been picked up, or they have not been screened for vision or hearing defects, or they have not had some kind of a chronic illness or error of metabolism picked up.

C. Everett Koop

#12. Chronic illness is hard. Pain is hard. Isolation is hard. The financial cost is hard. Grieving is hard and necessary and sometimes takes far longer than we every imagined.

Cindee Snider Re

#13. I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

Marya Hornbacher

#14. Chronic illness is not caused by a bad gene, or a Gypsy curse, nor is it a function of aging. Chronic disease is caused by chronic nutrient deficiencies.

Peter Glidden

#15. The increasing fascination with and funding of genetic technology is simply another medical dead end, another reductionist rabbit hole that will lead us no further toward preventing and reversing chronic illness.

T. Colin Campbell

#16. I thought having a chronic illness would make my life detour in ways I didn't want to accept, but I've learnt that have a chronic illness made the only detours that are worth the growth.

Nikki Rowe

#17. We can feel isolated and powerless when living with chronic illness, but what if your story begins to bridge the barrier or open a way for someone to connect? What if your story offers a glimmer of hope to someone standing at the edge of desolation? ...What if your story starts the conversation?

Cindee Snider Re

#18. I felt an attack of my most chronic illness - the pain of missing out.

Steve Toltz

#19. AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.

Yusuf Hamied

#20. We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.

Harvey V. Fineberg

#21. By taking the time to focus on our mental and emotional well-being, we can minimize our triggers and reduce the likelihood of a recurrence.

Sarah Hackley

#22. Futility. Uselessness. Bloody entrophy. Death matters, at least sometimes.

Diana Gabaldon

#23. Because the truth was I was tired. I was tired of fighting but more importantly I was tired of losing, of being disappointed.

Laekan Zea Kemp

#24. My lip trembled, my throat raw, and I started to cry. But not because I didn't look perfect. But because I looked healthy and because I wasn't sure how long I'd stay that way.

Laekan Zea Kemp

#25. When we make decisions that honor our dreams and priorities, we also make choices about what we won't prioritize. We must embrace these choices as well.

Sarah Hackley

#26. As with many life-altering events, an autoimmune illness is almost guaranteed to cause you to re-evaluate your priorities.

Joan Friedlander

#27. I will be living with chronic pain for the rest of my life. I don't have the mobility, energy or life options I used to have. I work hard to manage the pain, and I want the medical system to be a respectful and effective partner, not a jailer. The opioid crisis is not my doing.

Sonya Huber

#28. It's okay that I got sick, I suddenly realize. If Lyme hadn't taken me down so radically, I wouldn't have learned about stillness. I would not have discovered my enormous capacity to endure. I would have not have embraced this deeply contemplative place within my own being.

Katina Makris

#29. Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.

Maria Dahvana Headley

#30. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.

Piper Kernan

#31. Dealing with chronic anxiety has taught me to better understand the nuances of mental illness and the very individual nature of it.

John Corey Whaley

#32. I felt entirely invisible and uncomfortably obvious all at the same time, sitting there in practically nothing in front of this stranger who was ignoring me.

Jessica Verdi

#33. His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense.

Siri Hustvedt

#34. With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness. - Amy Upham (203)

Robert Whitaker

#35. Ache my bones, flame my muscles, tingle my nerves, but you will never taint my beautiful mind & I will overcome this condition with the belief that I already have.
- CRPS AWARENESS -

Nikki Rowe

#36. If I had to pull an all-nighter studying for a test or too many looming deadlines had me pulling out my hair, I wouldn't end up with just some trendy coffee addiction. I'd end up in a mini-coma, face down in the middle of the studio or on the floor of the community showers.

Laekan Zea Kemp

#37. He mistook my frustration for anger towards him, which seemed to be typical for us lately. The longer the distance between a correct diagnosis, the greater the silence we shared.

Tracey Berkowitz

#38. There is some evidence that chronic severe depression causes some atrophy or shrinkage in the hippocampus. Depressive illness could therefore be seen as a very subtle form of degeneration in some nerve cells.

Stefan Cembrowicz

#39. Remember this: You are the expert of your body.

Sarah Hackley

#40. By staying, by shirking the responsibility and effort of leaving, by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children nor a public companion nor a welcoming home-do I do wrong?

Anna Lyndsey

#41. An hour seldom passed in which she didn't either sneeze, pick her nose, or wipe a bogie onto her snot-encrusted sleeve. But she had such a lovely colour. That pink glow which comes with the flu used to engulf her like an aura. It suited her. She always looked so damn effervescent.

Joss Sheldon

#42. Recently God asked me the same question in a new way, "And if I don't allow you to heal, if I never remove the pain, will you still trust Me?

Cindee Snider Re

#43. Take charge of hidden, sneaky sources of chronic inflammation that can trigger illness and disease by wearing comfortable shoes daily, getting an annual flu vaccine, and asking your doctor why you're not on a statin and baby aspirin if you're over the age of forty.

David Agus

#44. Happiness will be fleeting if you constantly search for it in places that can be taken away. It's an inside job.

Nikki Rowe

#45. Armed with my positive attitude and inherent stubborn nature, I keep my mind focused and my life moving forward. I stop to rest, pout and even cry sometimes, but always, I get back up. Life is giving me this challenge and I will plow through it, out of breath with my heart racing if I have to.

Amy B. Scher

#46. Behind every stressful thought is the desire for things to be other than they are.

Toni Bernhard

#47. My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.

Tracey Berkowitz

#48. Physically, mentally, emotionally
it seems like every part of me is broken in one way or another.

Patrick Carman

#49. My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt.

Anna Lyndsey

#50. We all feel inadequate very often. It's only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one's emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.

Taylor Caldwell

#51. A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.

Nancy Horan

#52. It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people's invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I'm even fooling myself.

Jalina Mhyana

#53. Sure, society understands visible shackles-- they get the symbolism of the wheelchair, of prosthetics, of a bumper sticker reading disabled veteran, but they still struggle for comprehension of the profound, invisible shackles that an illness such as [Chronic Fatigue] puts on a person's body.

Peggy Munson

#54. I create beautiful art, so I can look back on the life my body fell short of in such a way that it brings me peace.

Nikki Rowe

#55. Each small accommodation of my physical environment is an admission that things are not improving, that this is not some fleeting horror, that perhaps...But that is the unthinkable thought.

Anna Lyndsey

#56. I guess it's human nature to question yourself, to question why all the pain has had to happen? sometimes there isn't any answers it just is what it is and how we make ourselves feel and see through that, is what will determine how we move forward.

Nikki Rowe

#57. I hated that the greatest enemy of my lifetime... was also my truest love.

Bailey Vincent

#58. It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as 'the career women's disease'. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it

Hilary Mantel

#59. It is food - we now know that food is information, not just calories, and that it can upgrade your biologic software. The majority of chronic disease is primarily a food borne illness. We ate ourselves into this problem and we have to eat ourselves out of it.

Mark Hyman, M.D.

#60. I'm tired of having to struggle for what seems to come easily to everyone else.

Mercedes Lackey

#61. No matter what stage of illness we are in, whether we've just been diagnosed or we have lived with chronic migraines for decades, there are adjustments we can make to increase joy in our lives and to live more fully.

Sarah Hackley

#62. But maybe I could give myself something too - permission to keep trying. Even when it felt like it was all for nothing. Even if trying was all I ever did, I shouldn't stop.

Laekan Zea Kemp

#63. In any case, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.

M. Scott Peck

#64. Chronic disease is a foodborne illness. We ate our way into this mess, and we must eat our way out.

Mark Hyman, M.D.