You’d think that having a parent who happens to be a doctor/nurse would be awesome. You’d never get sick, because those doctor people know how to prevent sickness, or else how do they not get sick after spending their days with the seriously ill?, and if you happened to catch the flu on a fluke, well they’d be by your side, feeding you chicken soup and those magical get better quickly pills, right? And hey even if you have some horrible recurring illness like lupus or RSD, the salary makes up for the suffering, I mean all doctors make the big bucks and drive BMW’s, right?

Notsomuch. I’ve grown up having a father (doctor) and mother (nurse) who are both in the medical field. The latter is amazing when it comes to her kids being sick. She’s at their side whenever they beckon, she cooks you chicken and dumplings when you can’t hold down solids, and she helps you get to the toilet before you have explosive diarrhea and feed you pain relieving pills when you’re in horrendous pain. The former, the doctor father, well he’s a different story.

The best advice my dad can muster up is get over it. School can’t be missed, unless you’re IN A COFFIN. Hell, when I was eight years old and vomiting in his sportscar on the way to school, he just cleaned up his interior and dropped me off as usual. Almost every time I was ill in elementary school, (which was quite a bit, because I have a notoriously shitty immune system,) my dad didn’t speak to me. Was he avoiding me intentionally or was he trying to keep away from the germs? He hardly ever asked how I was doing, never took care of me much less help my mom take care of me, and that hasn’t changed. Ask my dad to write a prescription for just two pills of phenergan (keeps you from vomiting) and he’ll look at you like you’re an alien that’s just arrived in his house and insulted his mother.

The most offensive of all is that he won’t acknowledge my RSD, and blames it all on my mom. He actually told my mother a year ago that he believed she was ’subconsciously making me sick’. That hurt her so much, and pissed me off. I recently sent him (and my paternal aunt and grandmother) an email explaining the year I’ve had and how painful this horrible disease is, how alone I felt in it all, and I KNOW he received it, but he has yet to respond, or mention it. It was almost two months ago, and it just shows how stunted he is emotionally. He can’t handle the fact that I might be ill with something he cannot fix, or control.

I guess I’m just a little bitter.