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Amy Oestreicher

Guest Posts, Illness

How My Invisible Illness Made Me Capable of Anything

July 18, 2016
illness

By Amy Oestreicher

I’ve always thought myself capable of overcoming anything.  Overcoming illness meant waiting for a fever to go down. Illness was a stuffy nose – a sick-day, an excuse to miss a day of school. At 18 years old, “illness” took on an entirely different meaning. Illness meant waking up from a coma, learning that my stomach exploded, I had no digestive system, and I was to be stabilized with IV nutrition until surgeons could figure out how to put me back together again. Illness meant a life forever out of my control and a body I didn’t recognize.

What happened to me physically had no formal diagnosis. I had ostomy bags and gastrointestinal issues, but I didn’t have Crohn’s disease. Doctors were fighting to keep me alive, but I had no terminal illness. There was so much damage done to my esophagus that it had to be surgically diverted, but I was never bulimic. I didn’t fit into any category. Suddenly, I was just “ill”.

I became a surgical guinea pig, subject to medical procedures, tests and interventions, as devoted medical staff put hours into reconstructing and re-reconstructing me, determined to give me a digestive system and a functional life. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

Healing From Numbness

October 20, 2015

By Amy Oestreicher

“Healing” has meant different things to me at various points in my life.  As a child, healing took forever when I skinned my knee running around outside.  As a teen, healing also meant crying on the phone to a friend when the “guy of my dreams” was taken.  But “healing” took a completely new meaning – on the inside and out – when my life and world as I knew it changed forever.

When I turned 17, a mentor-figure in my life who I had known and looked up to for several years transformed into a complete stranger when he started to molest me.  I went into total shock and coped by leaving my body and staying numb.  This father-figure in my life who I completely trusted had broken our sacred bond in a split second, and suddenly I didn’t know who I could rely in.  I kept this secret burning in my gut, hidden from my family, who didn’t recognize the numb space-cadet I had become.

I was so out of touch with my emotions that it was hard for me to face that I had been betrayed by someone who intimately inside my circle of trust.  One day, I was browsing through the bookstore. Pacing through the aisles (as my way of coping and marking time) and I experimented with scanning the “Self-Improvement” aisle.  I had an instinct that something within me had changed, but I wasn’t exactly sure what.  It wasn’t even a reality to me that someone so close within my circle of trust could betray me in such a horrific way.  I “window-shopped” each shelf, trying to look as casual as possible, when a big yellow book popped out at me:  The Courage to Heal.

I was struck by those words – courage, heal.  Was there something I was scared to face, that I needed to find the strength inside to really confront face to face?  I involuntarily reached for the thick yellow binding – as though someone else was leading me towards this.  Now I was face to face with the cover, every now and then glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one was looking. Continue Reading…