Side Effects and Skewed Perceptions

Okay, so I am essentially an open book.. <enter blog>, and I have always talked very candidly about what I am going through and what I have gone through. 

So I noticed something recently. 

When I was a teenager and at the beginning of all of this, I saw my whole predicament as simply 'the reality of things'. 

When I would start a new medication and read a list of side effects, I approached those side effects as inevitabilities - not uncommon. I would see that list and fully expect to experience most of those side effects, if not all of them. To me, it was part of the package, part of the process, and I believed that the vast majority of people suffered those side effects. I'm not talking about the usual 'stomach pain, nausea, diarrhea, and headaches' here either. I'm talking about the drastic changes in appetite, the nightmares or difficulty sleeping, muscle pain, convulsions, weakness, tremors, and particularly hallucinations. Things that I now realize I likely should have complained about, but I truly thought I was expected to handle them. 

So there I was, a teenager with an open-book policy, sharing all of these side effects I was experiencing - thinking that these are widespread and entirely normal!! The big one has always been hallucinations. While I was on Prednisone they were particularly bad, and I was on and off of that medication for so long that I still have the episodes, especially during the dips of my personal rollercoaster or having to take certain medications. 

As an adult I am realizing how nuts that sounds. I have realized that hallucinating is not necessarily a 'normal and expected' part of chronic illness... but when it was SO prevalent at 14 years old, listed on the pamphlet of side effects on various medications, and never entirely subsiding, it has simply been a part of my reality... for over 20 years. 

I wonder now, though, how my classmates, friends, and even the adults in my life must have thought whenever I divulged that particular part of my reality... 

I mean, it goes for a lot of different scenarios that we experience as kids/teens - what we think was a normal way to grow up seems utterly bonkers once we've become adults.