I'm actually more confused than ever, because I consider this woman my friend.
Friendship is a tricky thing. Here's a relevant anecdote:
Most of the residents of my building are retirees. When I moved in here last year, two of them in particular were always sitting in the little lounge area next to the entrance, chatting continually with each other and with anyone who entered or left the building. One of them is very sweet and cheerful and friendly, always a nice thing to say about everyone (she is a retired health care worker, I believe). The other is moodier, rather self-righteous and defensive, and passive-aggressive: lots of backhanded compliments and subtle digs. But they were, to anyone's eyes, good buddies who enjoyed each other's company. The sweet one did the mean one's laundry, while the mean one was almost always there for the sweet one to talk to (the sweet one only recently moved to town and doesn't know many people here).
Fast forward a year. They now sit by the entrance only rarely, and never together. It turns out that the sweet one got tired of the mean one's subtle but biting verbal abuse and started hanging out with a couple of new friends. The mean one flipped out, simply because the sweet one was no longer so dependent on her for social companionship. The mean one made various mean-spirited accusations, most notably that the sweet one and her new friends were on the hunt for men (an interesting bit of projection there). In response, the sweet one withdrew further, and the mean one just became all the more bitter and resentful.
So it turns out that these two good buddies weren't really friends at all, any more than two people in a co-dependent partnership are really lovers. The mean one liked having the sweet one around because she could boost her own ego by talking down to her, and the sweet one was so good-natured, self-effacing, and isolated that she just took it. In reality, their "friendship" was very ugly and manipulative, and it fell apart as soon as the sweet one started taking better care of herself by getting out and making new friends.
Now, I'm not saying that your friendship with your housemate is similarly ugly. But I do think that a good measure of a friendship (or any relationship) is how each friend responds to the other looking after her own individual well-being. You, sikora, are clearly ready to sacrifice (and risk) a great deal to help your friend. Is she willing to do the same for you? And, perhaps more important, how will she respond to your doing what you need to do to take care of yourself?
The ideal friendship/relationship is one in which each person takes good care of herself individually and supports the other in doing the same. A more problematic but still workable relationship is one where neither person takes good care of herself, but both do their best to take care of the other (this was my marriage for many years). Where you really get into trouble is when neither person takes good care of herself, but one conscientiously looks after the other while the other takes advantage. And note that this latter situation is bad even if the one taking advantage does so unintentionally, just by being a very needy person who is so overwhelmed by her own problems that she is oblivious to the needs of others.
On that note, I have to comment on this:
I wouldn't go so far as t_r_b on the borderline personality awful manipulator route, but it does sound like she's perfectly happy to inconvenience you.
I certainly didn't mean to suggest that the roommate is borderline. I haven't heard anything that points toward that diagnosis. Narcissistic, maybe, but not borderline. And it's most likely not a personality disorder at all, but rather a person who (unlike sikora) has learned to seek relief from her woes in the caregiving of others. Some of us learn as children that if it hurts, you suck it up. Others learn that if it hurts, the only way to make it stop is to whine loud enough that someone else makes it feel better. It sounds like Sikora falls firmly in the former camp, while the roommate is much more in the latter (and on the pain management front, I like macaroon's suggestion a lot).
And possibly the problem here is that both of you are having difficulty advocating for yourselves. :)
Yes yes yes. The roommate isn't good at being the squeaky wheel in the health care system, which is designed to screw over all non-squeaky wheels. And she's found it's much easier to squeak at sikora, who is much more compassionate (and closer at hand) than the health care bureaucrats. The roommate probably does feel just as helpless as she represents herself, but that doesn't mean that she actually IS that helpless, and it certainly doesn't make it sikora's job to make up for the difficulties inherent in getting decent care in this country.
Meanwhile, we have a nice evening together. I made quinoa pilaf and steamed broccoli and resisted getting up to feed her dog. Roommate did the Frankenstein walk to her dog's food bin, to the kitchen sink, placed the food bowl on the floor, and back again to the couch. I had to consciously make myself not offer to do it myself.
Please recognize that the Frankenstein walk is part of the manipulation. If she constantly repeats, "Sikora, please feed my dog for me," you will sooner or later decide she is being too demanding and stop complying. It's much more effective (at winning your compliance) for her to make a performance out of her efforts to take care of herself, so as to fill you with sympathy and guilt (after all, you can walk around normally: shouldn't you be helping more?)
I'm not saying that she is doing all of this intentionally, or fraudulently: she really is uncomfortable, and she really feels like she can't perform basic tasks easily. But I suspect that she isn't actually as uncomfortable as she appears, and that she would walk less awkwardly if she were more determined to take care of herself. Since she feels helpless, she doesn't, and since she needs you to recognize and validate her helplessness, she acts it out a bit. I did pretty much the same thing when I was a kid and didn't want to go to school. I really did feel kind of ill, but my parents didn't take my illness seriously enough: they still insisted that I go to school! So I exaggerated my symptoms a bit: not because I was deliberately trying to mislead them, but because they clearly needed more prompting to recognize the stay-home-from-school-level severity of my ailments. Sadly, this tactic did not often work on my parents, which is probably why I don't do this today. But maybe it worked a bit better on your roommate's parents.
Great job, by the way, on consciously noticing and suppressing the urge to feed the dog for her. That's exactly what you need to be doing right now, both for your own well-being and to encourage her not to depend on you too much (and to depend on herself more).
My Army experience is not helping, because in the Army to work through pain even when it means long term damage is both honorable and required. Esp. for women. It's hard to let that go.
Your army training and, IIRC, the emotional abuse of your childhood. For a long time, you have been living with cognitive distortions telling you that you are a deeply flawed human being who doesn't deserve love and care, but that you owe lots of love and care to others. You have come a long way toward overcoming those self-abnegating messages, but they got drilled into you at a pretty young age and are really hard to shake completely. So even though you've gotten much better at taking care of yourself, and recognizing that you deserve to take good care of yourself, you remain very susceptible to the suggestion that you need to set your own needs aside to take care of someone else. And there are definitely people in this world who thrive on taking advantage of others with that susceptibility. Maybe your roommate is one of those manipulators, or maybe she's just hurt and scared. Either way, in the long run, you setting aside your own needs to take care of her is not going to do either of you any good. A true friend would be far too concerned about your health to let you do that.
