Sweetheart

He knealt down, held my hand, turned his penetratingly blue eyes to me, called me Sweetheart and stabbed me in the wrist with a needle.

One of the things that I find ever so difficult about chronic illness is the restrictions it puts on socialising and opportunities to meet people ... most specifically, potential partners. I yearn for a relationship. I yearn for the possibility of marriage and children, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter who I am as a person, the fact is that the life I lead - with chronic illness - isn't attractive. It doesn't matter if I am a good person with plenty of positive things to offer and love to give; the fact that I live so close to the edge of life so much of the time turns people away. I can fully appreciate that it's stressful for those around me and who care about me, especially as it's a recurrent situation, but it saddens me that my prospects for relationships are so stunted.

I am on the receiving end of many terms of endearment when I'm in hospital - sweetheart, honey, treacle, dear, flower etc - and many of them said by men, but male doctors. They don't mean them as terms of endearment, but as something to soothe the pain they are about to inflict, or the stress of the situation, or their own anxieties about the difficulty I'm having in breathing. I would so love to have someone call me sweetheart and to actually be their sweetheart. There is a hole in my life that I know can only be filled by a loving relationship, and it saddens me so much to think about how slim the chances are of this hole ever being filled, because of the unattractive feature of severe brittle asthma and the shadow of death in my life.

I'm okay on my own. I'm independent and self-sufficient. I have excellent friends, but I do wish I had the company of a man who loved me ... and I wish I had the possibility of children ... a family of my own.