Is there anything more challenging or distressing than being sick and having your own parents not take you seriously, so you have to silently suffer for years?
Back when this 17-year-old guy was a toddler, he got sick at an alarming rate, but his mom and dad brushed it off and treated him like that was normal.
They never stopped to ask why he was falling ill so often, even after his doctor stated she wanted him to be monitored since it was abnormal for his age.
Still, his parents didn’t listen. Then, when he began going to school, he would constantly let his mom and dad know that he was feeling horrible. They dismissed him and forced him to go anyway.
“9/10 [times], that would result in the school nurse calling them and asking them to take me home. My parents told me they knew I just didn’t like school, and I couldn’t be sick that often,” he explained.
“We went on for three years exactly like that. The times they did decide to keep me home, they were annoyed I would sleep for a lot of it, and they told me it proved nothing because I clearly just liked sleep.”
“When I was 8, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. It didn’t happen because my parents finally started to take it [seriously]; it was actually diagnosed because I went to school feeling okay, but during lunch, I got really dizzy and lightheaded, and I felt really weak.”
His school called an ambulance, and he was brought to the hospital, where he finally got a diagnosis. If that hadn’t happened, his mom and dad would have kept on ignoring him.
You would think that the diagnosis would make his parents pay attention once and for all, but they acted like he was still faking it!
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They forced him to go to school even when he felt too sick to be there. They got angry at him when he had to return home. He felt like garbage, but his mom and dad painted him as a liar.
“When I was 15, we got into a fight over it, and they admitted they didn’t believe I was as bad as I was claiming. They said I was acting like I was suffering all the time when, in reality, I was probably just trying to get out of school,” he added.
“Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with a form of epilepsy on top of my autoimmune disease. The seizures I have are small and aren’t noticeable to most people unless they are really focused on me, but they have built up enough to cause extra problems for me. And combined with my autoimmune disease, they sort of play against each other to make me worse.”
“My parents had a scare with the epilepsy diagnosis, and now they’re suddenly willing to accept I actually feel like [trash] and I have been suffering all this time. They apologized and asked me to forgive them, and they said they want us to work together to make sure I can lead as normal a life as possible.”
He can’t forgive them now, and he doubts he can ever get to a point where he will. He’d rather not, since his parents are the reason his life was so much harder than it had to be.
It’s taken his parents over a decade to finally see that he has not been exaggerating. He believes he deserves better than this, but he has some other family members who are imploring him to figure things out with his mom and dad.
His mom and dad are playing the victims, and he’s worried about losing the little support he does have if he refuses to forgive them both.
His parents are horrible for medically neglecting him and even worse for trying to make it seem like they got the short end of the stick for not believing him.
I think it makes the most sense to pretend to forgive his mom and dad just to keep the peace. He requires their support to get all of the medical help he needs at the moment.
After he graduates and is able to go to college or move out, he can decide if he wants to go no or low contact with his parents, but for now, he has to play the game.
What advice do you have for him?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
