You were born with several chronic illnesses. Chronic illnesses that hardly affected you at first. In fact the effects of them were so minimal that you didn’t think that anything was wrong. You brushed off the mild dizzy spells as dehydration or low blood sugar, you brushed the joint pain off as a natural part of life and invested in a heating pad. You were unintentionally modifying your life to work around chronic illnesses you didn’t know you have.

The thing about chronic illnesses is that sometimes they just need a spark before they ignite into a much larger problem. You had managed to catch pneumonia after getting fluid in your lungs. At first you thought it was just a bad chest cold so you medicated and went about your day. Soon enough you were struggling to breathe and your lips had suddenly developed a blue-ish tint.

That’s when you finally went to the hospital. They kept you there for a few days, hooked up to IVs, antibiotics and whatever other meds they had you on being given through said IV. You recovered from pneumonia but came out of it with a whole host of other issues. Suddenly your dizzy spells had turned into fainting spells, your joint pain turned into frequent dislocations and subluxations.

It was torturous. Before you were even officially diagnosed you knew that your life would forever be different. It took years to be diagnosed. Years of doctors, specialists, and tests. You’d never been more exhausted in your life. Eventually it was concluded that you suffered from a fainting disorder and hypermobility, though you are still waiting to see a geneticist to learn exactly what type of hypermobility it is.

Having the diagnosis made your life a little easier. Your fainting disorder is severe enough that insurance covers the cost of a service dog and any mobility aids you may need. With the diagnosis your job legally had to accommodate you, and you managed to get a deal from a construction company who made your home a little more accessible. Life certainly isn’t easy but it could definitely be harder.

Despite all these improvements you still have days like today. Days where you decide to ignore your service dog’s first alert while grocery shopping, days where your world tilts on an angle and you sit on the floor as quickly as you can. Days where your service dog has to run off to bring the nearest person to you to help.

Today he found John Price. A veteran who retired after an injury caused him too many mobility issues and a really bad concussion left him with a fainting disorder. He too has a service dog so he understood exactly what it meant when he had one approach himself and his dog. He follows your dog to the aisle you fainted in and sits next to you. You’re slumped against the shelves and don’t seem to have hit your head so he grasps one of your wrists, tracking your pulse while keeping track of how long you’ve been fainted.

When you come to your service dog is laying next to you, his head on your thigh. You instinctively reach out to scratch him behind the ears while you recover only to find your wrist trapped by a large man sitting beside you with his own service dog laying next to him.

“Glad to see you back with the land of the living.” He quips lightly. “I was beginning to get concerned.” He adds after a moment, just to make sure you know that he does recognize the potential injuries you may have suffered when you fainted.