Professionalsickgirl

Do you ever just stop and take a minute, to think about which Disney heroine you might have been in another life?

Like many a millennial I often seek to take inspiration from Walt and shoehorn my experiences into the relevant cartoon princess. Say, If I were to sum up the experience of having Cystic Fibrosis and Cystic Fibrosis related Diabetes into the form of a Disney protagonist? Cinderella would be my girl.

When you start to look into it, the resemblance is there. Sure, I’m short on ballgowns, but when the clock strikes 1pm everyday I must rush from the office to the nearest Pret for a healthy serving of melted cheese, avocado and precociously arranged flatbread lest I risk an attack of hypoglycaemia. Or I might just be hangry, to be fair.

Woe the girl (or gent) with CF who does not pay attention to the rhythms of a rapid metabolism and an unreliable pancreas.

And what is the optimum hour for a CF Cinderella to leave the ball on an evening, or more likely, the pub? 10pm actually; only midnight on very special occasions.

Beyond the chimes of Big Ben at the twenty second hour, there is very little benefit to be gained from staying out; the ugly sisters of nebulising and physiotherapy are waiting for me at home.

To my mother and my boyfriend; I admit to not being the most punctual person I know. There I said it. While there is no excuse for tardiness, I suppose younger me would say that she didn’t see the time and her imagination had run away with her, or there was something exceedingly trivial that she just had to do, only it didn’t feel trivial at the time to a girl who lived inside her own head.

But there is one type of timely obligation that I have slowly learnt to respect, one which trumps all others. Those times where I simply have to be somewhere else, ‘lest I miss nightly treatment. Or when I really do have to make it to a last minute check up at the hospital. I guess some strikes of the clock are simply more important than others; we all have our own obligations, these are merely my own.

So if you ever see me sneaking off early from after-work drinks without saying goodbye, please rest assured that I’m not being rude. I probably do like you; I just have drugs to do.