Call me lucky. Call me blessed. Just don't call me first thing in the morning. It might take me an hour to find just the right way to extricate myself from bed with the minimal amount of pain. Last year I would have faced the day and the phone with trepidation and upon the guarantee of missing your call, tears. You see last year I suffered from two invisible disabilities.

The first, diagnosed some ten years before, is an autoimmune disorder which affects the intestines, every major organ in which it can hide, and an insidious arthritis that symptomatically resembles Rheumatoid Arthritis. And while the arthritis can be the source of red and swollen joints,it remains primarily invisible. Therefore to those outside of my world it appears that I'm relatively healthy and certainly suspect.

The second, and which is why I invite you to call me lucky or blessed, was an illness that no one, not even me, could see. Cloaked in secrecy and shame, it took years to settle in and begin to leave it's own scars. Physicians have termed this disability "depression due to chronic illness" and determined that the right medicines were anti depressants and a "by God, stop feeling sorry for yourself, get off the sofa and go for a walk, lots of people have it worse than you do, take this pill and call someone else in the morning attitude". I knew better for I was no more depressed than the average Joe. Worried, yes. Scared and drained from battling the primary disease, yep. These were emotions however,from which all of us suffer from time to time. No pill on the market was going to fix this. No amount of cheerfulness, gratitude, or walking was going to ease this ache. And while I can't offer a fitting terminology, I can tell you it's a body double for lack of self esteem.

I thought I'd grown and stretched in my life time to become pretty comfortable in my skin, until my skin grew and stretched too, in an effort to accommodate the swelling caused by massive doses of steroids. I believed that I had long passed the age of narcissism, until I noticed that no one was noticing me, aside from the second looks at said swelling. And I absolutely knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was a valued, needed, and appreciated contributor to the family, community, and work place to which I belonged. That is until I could no longer contribute. My love for and trust in my country, my belief in it's safety nets and compassion also led me to believe that it would never

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