Accepting Limitations

For most of my life, I suffered recurring, horrific colds and respiratory infections. My first bout of strep occurred when I was in the second grade. I missed most of the winter of grades 4 through 7 because of pneumonia. My mother would sit up with me nights while I experienced coughing fits. Eventually, I figured out how to function while ill. I remember driving from Manhattan to Hartford for a business meeting accompanied by a box of tissues, a bottle of seltzer and a box of Hall's cough drops. Finally, at the age of 48, I was diagnosed with an immune deficiency and immediately felt different in my own skin.

A friend recently discovered that she and her son lack a sufficient amount of a component in their blood called Von Willebrand factor. Von Willebrand factor enables blood to clot. This woman gave birth to two children and miscarried a third. Her son bruised easily in contact sports. It never occurred to anyone that there was a problem until the son had oral surgery recently. His failure to clot properly resulted in a diagnosis. All of the sudden, my friend and her son found themselves confronting the reality that they were, in fact, living with a flawed.


It feels slightly creepy to learn that you really have any type of non-visible disability. There is a sudden, yet invisible change. You are not who you thought you were; you deceived yourself. Instead of being a strong, healthy person, you are a person with a problem and the problem has a name. Those are two very different identities, and ours is a society in which weakness is not a positive. As always, self-acceptance remains a challenge.