How did you or a close friend or family member deal with the weird mixed emotions that sometimes happen when they started to recover from a chronic long term illness?

I’ve spent the last 10 years going to different doctors about my thyroid. I had several years of misdiagnosis, severe lack of cooperation with doctors, ineffective treatments and generally felt like nobody listened to me or really cared about whether or not it was possible for me to recover.

After all these years, I found an amazing doctor who ran the right tests and then gave me a pill which has made me feel so much better almost overnight. This isn’t a new experimental drug—in fact it’s older than the one I had been taking all these years.

I have more energy than I’ve had in a decade. I feel more than 10 years younger. I am so excited and I feel like I have hope for the first time in a very long time.

At the same time, I am starting to feel bitterness and anger. I wasn’t expecting these strong emotions. I am so angry that it took almost no effort at all for this new doctor to discover and diagnose a very simple, effective and inexpensive treatment. Had just one doctor listened to me in the past, it could have saved me a decade of pain and suffering.

I have gained 110 pounds. I gained so much weight that I need a special breathing machine to keep my throat from collapsing when I sleep ant try to breathe at the same time. had severe mood swings and difficulties with concentration and holding a job. I have deep scars all over my body from the chronic rashes and hives. I went from a very physically active person to someone who slept 16 hours a day and needed more sleep. I stopped enjoying just about everything that I felt made me really feel like me. I just became a big lump of sickness. I am getting better now, but it’s going to take several years to fix myself and I will never fully be back to what I was. I not only suffered physically, but I think of emotional social and employment problems and much of my entire life is in shambles that will take years to fix even if I work at it very hard.

I want to be more positive and joyful about my recovery, but these bitter angry thoughts keep coming back. I feel like writing horrible letters to the doctors and telling them I felt like they stole a decade of my life from me. I want them to lose their practices. I want them to pay for what they did.

I haven’t felt this vindictive in my life about anything. It’s putting a damper on what should otherwise be a very happy time in my life. I wondered if others had expierienced this. How did you cope? Are there any known support groups for situations like this?