Katie’s Story
We had the opportunity to work with Photographer Jill Demianiw of Luxe Images by Jill. We were asked if we were available for a photo shoot. One where the makeup request would be dark, smokey makeup, looking as though it had been on a few days. Kind of heroine chic. Our creativity loves these kinds of opportunities, and we joined this edgy concept of a shoot!
Little did I know, when I read the story of Katie, that I would be so deeply impacted by her words. This disease can be crippling. It has affected so many people, and its story has not been told in a way that Katie so eloquently and descriptively tells it. Please read her story. It is a humbling one that is brilliantly captured by Jill. The painful journey that is Fibromyalgia.
Makeup by Molly. Hair by Katie and Jill
This is Katie’s story…
It began with the numbness and tingling in my feet… the doctors said it was the Reynaud’s getting worse or maybe just because I was a girl… Then the headaches got worse…
The other symptoms slowly came and the pain, the constant pain was and is the worst. Never ending doctor appointments, blood tests and scans. Years, so many years, it was about 5 years.. then I was diagnosed. And found someone who listened…
After the deafening silence of the previous years it was amazing to have someone who heard me, who gave me hope. However, now years after the diagnosis, some days, more than some days hope is just a dream.
In a world where no one can understand or feel what it is like. To have a pain that no one can experience, understand, appreciate or SEE. I am a person with a sickness.. you just may not see my Fibromyalgia when you look at me. But I feel it…
It is frustrating, irritating and it feels like it will never end. I am trapped… strangled, by my disease. It stops me from doing the things I once loved, exhausts me, weighs on me.
Some days I have to be stronger….some days I am weaker. Some days I want to give up. Each day I try to go on, through the pain…. I look for the hope and I have always found it.
And each day that is dark, I know there is a day that will have more light, less pain than the day before and maybe a better day for tomorrow.
I did this photo shoot so that I could express my inner feelings of being a “sick person”, a person “with a disability”.. those words are still hard still difficult for me to say. And even today people knowing is hard, but positive because the more knowledge about chronic pain diseases the greater a chance for a cure, the greater a chance that one day people will understand the things you do not see effect people all around you.
