So as I sit here, trying to recover from covid, that makes it sound dramatic but please do not worry I’m doing alright, thankfully.

I’m thinking back to Saturday night, when I was trying to convince myself, I had the physical energy to eat, as I was hungry, and I couldn’t seem to find it. But with my life experience of cerebral palsy, it isn’t all that unique that I don’t have the physical energy to eat on the odd occasion, this is what I have referred to in the past as CP tired. In these situations, my mum has fed me in the past. So, I actually spent the night thinking about my mum, and how much I miss her. I probably only ate anything that night because I know that’s what she would want me to do.

But having this low level of energy never registered in my head as something I should be concerend about, as I say, this happens to me. And this got me thinking about how hard it can be to spot symtoms of something, when you’re chronically ill or disabled. Here I very easily colud have been overshadowing my covid symtoms as part of my cerebral palsy. By this I mean attributing the systoms I was experiencing to the wrong thing.

Luckily for me, the symptom that I was overshadowing was simply exhaustion, and this is not the most dangerous system to do that with. Though I would likely have figured out I had covid earlier without cerebral palsy. But there are many stories of people being in a lot of dangerous because of shadowing their own symptom.

So I want to take this oportunity to remind anyone reading this who is disabled and chronically ill to pay extra attention to when you feel different, and do what you can to look after yourself.

It’s okay to be wrong about something else being wrong with you, it can be incredibly dangerous to miss what could be wrong with because you don’t want to be wrong about something being wrong.

The version of this, in which medical professionals overlook symtoms is called diagnostic overshadowing. If you’re chronically ill or disabled, or there is a chance you will be spending a lot of time in hospital, it might be something worth looking into. It is essentially where a doctor or other medical professional attributes an existing medical condition to being the reason for your systoms, which results them in not actually investigating the symtoms someone is experiencing.

This happened to me once as a teenager when a doctor decided that the numbness and tingling, I was feeling in my hands and feet were anxiety, and of course I have anxiety because I’m disabled. *Insert after event eye role*

Though they were probably correct, which has only become evident because while I see occasionally experience those symptoms, I don’t experience any other symptoms. However, I still deserved to have my symptoms investigated properly, just in case there was something else going on.