Doctor Kara

I was talking to my friend the other day (Shout out to Elise!) and we were discussing our medications, IV's, and shots. Yes, this is "normal" talk for girls who go through this on a daily basis. She mentioned that I should discuss a certain topic on my new blog and I thought it would be a great idea!

Here's the topic:
There's a lot of inconsistencies when it comes to doctors, medications, parents, and what everyone thinks is best for you and what you should take to help you. But at the end of the day, you're the doctor and what you/your parents think is best is what should be done.

Yes, they are the professionals.
Yes, they have a doctorate in ____(enter your choice of specialization here)

But YOU are the one who has to live this life.
Not them.

YOU are the one who has to go through countless amounts of medicines and trials of different drugs, and getting your blood drawn to make sure they aren't killing you (that's not a road you wanna go down), and just pain in general.

Don't get me wrong, I trust their decision and 90% of the time, I follow it.

But if you're telling me to up my steroids when I just brought it down (steroids help with pain management, but make you gain tons of weight and can really be bad for your heart), I'm probably not going to listen to you. I'll take the pain instead.

Yes, I like to play doctor and boy have I gotten good at it.

They want you to try this drug and that drug or if something isn't working for you and they don't listen...ugh.

I'm a rare case. I'm allergic to EVERY drug out there, with the exception of the one I'm on. So with me it's kind of a hit and miss thing and normally, I'll push my limits for just about everything.

But when my liver tests come back horrible and we've stayed on this drug as long as my liver can take it, I've got to get off. I'm not going to see what happens if we switch meds and add this and take this away.
No. Not happening.
I'll be your guinea pig any day of the week, but when I've pushed my limits, I'm done. I would rather push through the pain that my body causes me than try and test which drug works and possibly kill my liver instead.

I have a losing deck of cards here, but which one is gonna hurt me less?

The other thing I like to do when I play doctor is like I said above, I like to push my limits. But this is in the sense of pushing my body limits. The doctors like to say, "just walk, try light exercise". Well, I like sports. I like contact sports to be exact. So I'm gonna be running, shooting basketball, throwing things, and giving it my 100%. It's what I do.
Will I hurt the next morning? Of course.
Do my doctors like when I do this? No, but I enjoy it and that's all that matters.
Will I regret this decision? Never.

Some of the best times in my life are when I'm giving it all I've got. I won't be able to move a muscle in my body the next day, but I lived, I had fun, and I won't ever regret doing that.

One day, I won't be able to walk, to move, to do the things I love. And if you have something like I do, you may not be able to do that as well.

So go have fun now. Go run a 5k mud run because you want to. If you feel like taking a risk, then do it! If you don't, especially if it comes to medicine, don't take it. Be your own doctor and look out for what's best for you. Find other options, other doctors, other medicines.

But most importantly,
Do what's best for you while you still can.