I’m Daddy’s little girl all grown up, but I still need my daddy.  I want to bask in his strong embrace.  Instead he gives my heart a chase.  He pushes me away into the wrong kind of space.

My dad and I hold polar opposite believes when it comes to the treatment of medicine.  I believe in studies and the scientific method.  He believes in testimonials and isolated case reports.  But that it is neither here nor there. In our differential beliefs we are at in impasse.  And no matter how I beg and plead I can’t get him to respect my wishes.

I even tried a different tact.  I recently agreed that once I am recovered from this current hospitalization I would agree to spend two sessions with an alternativie medicine worker of his choice and fully hear them out and what they think I should do for my health.  But then, my dad went the very next day against my will and set up a consultation between an alternative medicine doctor out of state and my current internist.  This is only one recent example of what has gone on over the years as I have struggled to find my path to health and he as struggled to get me to follow a completely different path.

Feelings are hurt, boundaries has been crossed, trust has been broken.  I am left unsure if I want him in my life at all right now.  As much as it would hurt to cut him out when I need his support the most, he doesn’t seem capable of giving me the support I need anyway.  So much trust has been broken.  I just want him to hold me and tell me it it will all be okay.  Instead he hold me at arms length and tells me what I’m dong wrong.

And the stress from this has been tremendous.  I can’t stop crying.  Between the being sick itself (34 total days in the hospital and counting) and the fear of the great unknown – all we really know so far is that my problem is with some kind of inflammation in the brain stem – it might be MS (multiple sclerosis) or something like it.  And then there’s my dad making it worse.  Telling me the treatment I’m choosing for myself is going to kill me.  He needs to respect that its my body and my choice and he just can’t for whatever issues he has gong n his inner psyche.

So in the meantime…  I will get by without him.

EDITED: to include clarification about my willingness to see certain alternative medicine practictioners.

My dad and I REALLY don’t see eye to eye when it comes to my choices of treatment.  He has a very hard time accepting that as a 25 year old woman they are in fact my choices and not his.  My dad is a staunch believer in some pretty radical (and some not so radical) alternative medicine treatments.  He believes that all my doctors are wrong because they are from a western medicine perspective.  He doesn’t even believe in my diagnosis.  So he sees my choice to follow conventional treatments in effect killing myself.  His words not mine.

This makes it VERY difficult to have a relationship with him since right now my health is such a big part of my life.  And he won’t agree to disagree.  I feel at such a loss at what to do.  I don’t want to cut him out of my life, but I don’t need his constant negativity about my choices.  I’m the one who is sick.  I shouldn’t have to take care of him and his anxieties as well.  But that’s basically been my role in my family my entire life.

As much as I wish my dad will change, I don’t believe he ever will.  I don’t know what that will mean for our relationship going forward, but it makes me sad that my illness is driving another wedge between a person I love and myself.  It happened with so many friends who just didn’t want to or couldn’t or didn’t know how to deal with someone their age being chronically ill.

People have such strong and personal reactions to someone else’s chronic illness that I think they easily forget what that person is going through.  My dad is afraid of some horrible side effect occurring from a medication I’m on, but he never acknowledges MY fears.  He tells me how he is sooo worried about me every day, but what am I supposed to DO with that?  Does he really expect me to be the one to comfort HIM?!

Just because I put on a brave face and do very best to be optimistic and make a life for myself despite my illness doesn’t mean I don’t have needs too.  It doesn’t make the intense lonliness and isolation or the fears for my future or the daily physical pain of my illness any less.

Buy my dad doesn’t see it this way.  So he continues to drive the wedge in deeper.  And it hurts.