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Let’s get this out of the way first: no one likes taking medication.

If my fairy godmother showed up in a sparkling red off the shoulder number (because my fairy godmother rocks) and offered to waive her magic wand over anything in my life, of course my first choice would be to magick away my multiple chronic conditions.

But she’s apparently busy elsewhere, because this hasn’t happened yet. So medication it is. It’s puffers three times a day for my asthma, it’s pills for pain, pills for acid reflux, pills for allergies, pills for hypertension, shots for energy (B12), shots for pain and shots to keep my RA tamped down hard.

I’m sure there’s more, but let’s move on.

I don’t like taking all this medication, being a frequent flyer at my GP because I don’t have the manual dexterity to do the shots myself, or always being aware of when I took the last pill for condition X, Y or Z and when I should therefore take the next in order to stay ahead of whatever symptom or condition that particular medication is treating.

It’s time-consuming, exhausting, and oh, so very boring.

Also expensive.

But I do like not being in pain (OK, being in relatively manageable pain). I also do like not feeling like my stomach is trying to eat itself. And having energy. And my RA being controlled. And I quite like being able to breathe freely. So I take the damn things.

I try to see the medication as tools that give me the freedom to feel as well as possible under the circumstances. Which is often well enough that I can focus on things other than being sick.

And I really like that.

The other day, as one of my attendants was helping me with my inhalers (which I also have problems operating myself because of that aforementioned manual dexterity issue), she looked at me all concerned and said “you don’t like taking these, do you?”

And I realized that I had no idea what she was talking about. Because I don’t pay attention to not liking taking my medication. I don’t pay attention to the fact that other people don’t have to do it. Because it’s just something I do and then get on with my life.

Because they enable me to get on with my life. To live to the fullest, to laugh, to love, and to do all the things that come with actually living, not merely existing.

It’s a long and convoluted argument, one I’m not aware of every time I inhale the spray that helps me breathe, take the pills that help me eat curry chips, and get the injection that shoves my RA down as far as possible.

Well, maybe I am aware of that last one. Because that’s still an awe-inspiring miracle to me.

But the rest is true. I just don’t pay attention to it. Because paying attention to it means I focus on being sick. And that’s the way into the abyss.

So I choose life.