like right now i'm in the stretch of weeks in spring where things are just ok. barely need my wheelchair. i can go hike all willy nilly and shit right now.

For a lot of people with dysautonomic disorders (POTS included) hot environments are hell. This goes x2 if the hot environment you’re in is humid rather than dry and things such as hot showers and saunas make you dizzy or tired (nothing worse for us than humid heat).

This happens because the extra warmth makes our blood vessels dilate even more than they already inadequately do and too dilated blood vessels may make your blood pressure low or unstable, which in turn means your upper body is deprived of enough oxygen (your blood is pooling down in your feet instead of being pushed upwards thanks to more constricted blood vessels). Most worryingly, our brains are being deprived of enough oxygen.

An oxygen deprived brain, especially if deprived of it persistently through time, causes chronic fatigue and brain fog, two symptoms often misdiagnosed as depression, since you have no energy to even think, focus or have good memory (brain fog), much less to be active, experience pleasure/enjoyment, or be motivated. It can also reduce sex drive, among many other things.

My poor mom went by years without knowing why the fuck she was having all these debilitating symptoms.

All it took was me making her add some more salt to her diet and have an isotonic drink daily and she IMMEDIATELY (as in, less than an hour) stopped feeling faint whenever she got up from kneeling down and her hair is slowly falling off less and less.

It’s not normal for any of that to make you light-headed or nauseous, or get blurry vision, headaches or palpitations.

It’s not normal for your body to suck at regulating its temperature and for your heart rate to go insane if you’re just mildly stressed.

It’s not normal to want to be active and “productive” but be unable to get your body to do anything so you just lay there, or if you manage to get anything done, you’ll need a whole week to recover.

It’s not normal to be tremendously tired all the time no matter how much you rest and sleep, even if people think you’re just “lazy”.

I’m pointing all these things out as abnormal because chronically ill people tend to not realize that our symptoms are symptoms.

Our individual bodies are the only bodies we’ve experienced and since most of us don’t look any different from others and aren’t taken seriously when we complain of any ailment, we assume our symptoms happen to everyone. They do not.

People with no physical conditions (at least not impairing ones such as being a bit short-sighted) do not have their bodies make life difficult for them, unless they’re temporarily ill. But we are ill ALL the time.

Take yourself seriously. Doctors and healthy people already don’t, so if you don’t take yourself seriously, who will?