You’re invited to Ben’s Friendly Get Together!
Will you be near Washington, DC on Friday evening, April 12th? Well then, you’re invited to join Ben (our founder) and Friends for a casual get together. Location will be somewhere in the National Harbor / Alexandria area, and time TBA.
Drop us a line at info(at)bensfriends.org (replace the (at) with @) if you think that you might be able to join us. We love meeting Ben’s friends in person!
NY Times Properly Addresses Chronic Illness
This article is by azurelle, a bensfriends.org moderator whose home community is Living With Facial Pain. She lives in the United States with a flock of three rescued parrots. When she’s not working on Ben’s Friends, she can be found writing short fiction or avoiding regular house work by doing miniature house work in her dollhouse.
An alert community member from our Psoriatic Arthritis group posted a recent article from the New York Times about living with chronic illness. The article opens with the statement “… I got sick and I never got better.”
That phrase is very telling and it’s very true. As a bensfriends.org moderator I read through all our different communities and the statement “I never got better” or the question “when will I get better?” is common. It doesn’t matter what the details of the issue are, the nature of being chronic creates a commonality that crosses all ages, races, orientations, and disease states. In fact, it’s the common denominator that links us together.
The author makes universal points about chronic disease. These are listed below, and below the list is a link to the full article.
- The mental part is as hard as the physical part.
- Your relationships change.
- Everyone offers you advice.
- You have to educate yourself – and everyone else.
- Support is everything.
Check out the link below and after you’re read the article, why don’t you pick one of the five points and start a new conversation in your home community about it? After all, you live with a chronic issue, I’m very sure you have valid experiences and important information to share.
Five Things I Wish I’d Known Before My Chronic Illness
Finding out you have a chronic illness — one that will, by definition, never go away — changes things, both for you and those you love.
Been Away For a While? Lost? Don’t know your password, or want a new one? Log-In isn’t working for you?
Here’s how to get right back into your Ben’s Friends community, lickety-split:
Click on this link to see a list of our communities, and then click on the colour banner for yours. Or just go straight to your home page if you remember it.
Your email @ddress is your [Username]. Use the email address on the “To” line of this message when it arrived in your email inbox.
If logging in is giving you difficulty, click on [Forgot My Password] and follow the instructions.
The system will send you instructions for getting back into the community. If you don’t see anything in your Inbox, check your Spam folder: sometimes these emails land there by mistake. Open the email and follow the instructions, and you’ll be back in your Ben’s Friends “home”.
As always, ask your community moderator or Moderator Support if there’s anything that we can do to help. (Click on the ModSquad avatar wherever you see it, and then on “Message”). That’s what we’re here for.
As always, all the best to you from all of us here at Ben’s Friends!
Checkout this weeks sponsor: Nadine West: https://www.nadinewest.com/
