Expect the worst then you won't be disappointed

Hope is a funny thing. People tell you all the time "don't lose hope", "you've got to have hope", but I feel like those people don't understand what it's like to have your hopes continuously dashed and destroyed. After 10 years of illnesses, surgeries, tests and medications, and multiple setbacks it's difficult for me to harbor any hope. It's not that I don't have it, it's that I don't want to have it. I actively try to keep myself from hoping anytime a new treatment or promise comes to light. I've been disappointed too many times, so now things that give me hope just piss me off. That's sort of how I feel right now. I know what the test results say. I can read them and I can theorize what they mean. I can research in medical journals, I can use the knowledge I have and come to some sort of understanding of what is happening or could be happening, as well as how to help it. But over the years I've learned that this knowledge and expectation, when I can read something and know scientifically what is happening and why and what should help it but then it doesn't, is just more damaging. 

So after one conversation already with an endocrinologist, one with nephrology and 8 more vials of blood, I still have to wait a week to discuss the diagnosis and treatment plan. 

I will have another conversation with a doctor whom I've never met in person and we will talk on the phone about these latest lab tests that came back wrong. I know what these lab results mean in terms of the physiology and pathology, and I know what the treatments are for these issues, but what I don't know is how this particular doctor is going to react and feel. Is she a doctor who errs on the side of caution and will give me the full blown treatments? Or is this yet another doctor who will tell me that everything is okay even though you can't function or get out of bed. So, yet again I feel like my life is in the hands of this one person whom I've never met, who doesn't know me at all, and will decide whether or not, and how to help me. You can see now why I don't want to get my hopes up. I'm fully expecting the doctor to say don't worry and send me back to my life feeling awful and unable to function the way I want to function with a bandaid treatment that doesn't cover the wound.

That old phrase "hope for the best but expect the worst" has for me now become "expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised if it doesn't happen". 

Yeah that's my melodramatic mindset right now, but it's the truth.