You don’t look sick l…has a body count….

I don’t look sick with all the chronic illnesses I have stacked against me.

And for years, that has meant the severity of what lives inside my body gets dismissed, minimized, and misunderstood…even by people who love me.

I have cardiomyopathy. My ejection fraction…the measure of how well my heart pumps, recently dropped from 50 to 42.

For context, normal is 55–70.

My heart function doesn’t just decline. It moves. It responds to my stress levels in real time.

I’ve learned to recognize this pattern in my own body. When my stress rises, my heart function drops. When I protect my peace, it stabilizes.

My body has become my most honest barometer. It doesn’t lie, even when I try to push through.

This didn’t even happen during the worst season of my life. It happened recently. During a season that wasn’t even my hardest.

And that’s the part that stays with me.

My threshold has changed. What I could once absorb…even imperfectly…my body can no longer tolerate the same way. Years of chronic illness have quietly lowered my ceiling.

The bucket fills faster now. It takes less to overflow.

I also live with hEDS, POTS, MCAS, fibromyalgia, stage 3 kidney disease, and diagnoses still unfolding. I am navigating perimenopause on top of all of it. And yes, I have good days. I fight hard for those days.

I have survived cancer. I chose life, for myself and for my child…when the odds weren’t in my favor and the doctors weren’t even sure I should.

I am not fragile.

But I am not invincible either.

And here is what I need the people in the lives of chronically ill women to understand…

Your stress becomes our symptoms.

This isn’t about blame. This isn’t about who is right or wrong. This isn’t even about intentions.

This is about biology.

When you introduce chronic stress into the life of someone whose nervous system is already dysregulated…whose heart is already working harder than it should…whose body is already fighting invisible battles every single day…

You are not just hurting their feelings.

You are hurting their body.

You are affecting their heart function, their pain levels, their ability to regulate, their capacity to keep fighting.

I have had a seizure from stress. I dissociated for the first time in my life over a year ago, and it terrified me. I have watched my own heart function respond to stress on medical imaging and known, with complete clarity, what was triggering it.

The chaos. The conflict. The unresolved anger and drama that gets brought to our door, it has a real physical cost.

One you cannot always see.

But our doctors can measure it.

It shows up on echocardiograms. In bloodwork. In neurological episodes. In numbers on a page that tell a story our faces have been trained to hide.

We are not being dramatic. We are not exaggerating. We are trying to stay alive.

Protecting my peace is not a luxury. It is not a preference.

It is medicine. It is cardiology. It is me choosing to still be here tomorrow.

And sometimes that means making hard decisions about who we allow close to us. Not out of anger. Not over small things. But because our body has made it clear that certain relationships carry a cost we can no longer afford to pay.

That isn’t cruelty. That is also medicine.

Bringing chaos into the lives of chronically ill people is not a neutral act. It has consequences…the kind that show up in doctor’s offices, in emergency rooms, on medical imaging.

We are choosing life every single day.

We are asking the people around us to help us do that.

Not make it harder.

#chronicillness #chronicillnessawareness #chronicillnesscommunity #chronicillnesssupport #chronicillnessreality