My Before I Go Project

Posted: June 8, 2022
Where: Instagram – @HayFarris

This year marks a decade I shouldn’t have survived.

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Working on a life + health update.

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CW: chronic illness, disability, mental health, nutrition, death, miscarriage, and marriage.

Take some very slow breaths, inhaling softly and expanding as deep into your lungs as you are able. If you’re still here, welcome. We’ll get through this together.

I plan to have a collection titled BEFORE I GO expanding on my decade+ of survival.  Released in segments & told in journal entries, reflection pieces, narrative nonfiction, health records, video clips, pictures, poems, audio, unpublished tweets, unsent messages, prayers, private texts, old blog posts from pre-illness, portions of health data, quotes from healthcare professionals that made impressions, thoughts about death, life, faith, hope, and love. All collected over the last decade beginning with my time working as a Doctor of Pharmacy / PIC and covering everything dealing with my survival.

BEFORE I GO will explore:

• Being bedridden,
• living only inside my head because my body was dying,
• not eating for years,
• intravenous nutrition & hydration,
• saying goodbye to my husband 4 times,
• slow loss of function,
• ICUs,
• hospitals,
• an LTAC,
• a nursing home stay at age 31,
• learning to eat again,
• learning to balance again,
• end of life planning replacing family planning,
• death conversations becoming the only conversations.

Everything tested. From my body to our dreams to our finances to our spirits to our faith to our newlywed marriage, no longer new. Pushing every single relationship we had. Searching for answers but finding only more questions.

Making a life through it all.

Buckle up. I no longer drive, so you ain’t buckling up with me behind the wheel. (?) We appreciate your patience as we are still also trying to enjoy our lives together with what little energy I have, and Jonathan is still doing double/triple/quadruple/infinity duty as a full time strength coach/caregiver/husband and provider (med debt yall. yikes.)

We aren’t the only ones out here like this. But we have been through quite a bit. ❤️

This is our story. And yes. I’m still sick.

We love y’all. Stay tuned. We have so much to share.

•If you do not have Instagram and would like to see a history, I am building a page with a copy of each of my instagram posts called Beyond IG. <— Click the words!

(Twitter screenshots from 5/24/22. Found here in a post with ALT text.)

• ← Chapter 4 — Hello darkness my old foe (a flowy letter)
• Chapter 2 — 😭 — Unique cruelty (personal journal entry) →