Any parent will tell you that parenting is hard. Parenting while trying to manage a chronic illness is even harder. But despite the plethora of chronic illnesses I have to manage, the one that has made parenting the most challenging is a spinal CSF leak. My leak, which the experts at Mayo Clinic discovered…
Chronic illness makes life hard. Multiple chronic illnesses make life even harder. That has been my experience since I first started collecting chronic illnesses like baseball cards about 9 years ago. (Does anyone collect baseball cards anymore, or did I just really date myself? But I’ve never collected baseball cards, so that’s probably a…
It was a warm summer morning when I arrived at the pain management center. I was there to have an epidural blood patch for a suspected spinal CSF leak. If the blood patch worked, it would be more or less diagnostic of a spinal CSF leak. My MRI imaging was read as normal, so…
The leak started with a play kitchen. I was home alone on December 17, 2020. My husband was out of town visiting his parents with our daughter, Bean. I spent much of the day wrapping Christmas presents for our family, preparing for two Christmases in the time of COVID. All I had left to…
Medical gaslighting is, unfortunately, an all too common experience in healthcare, especially among individuals with chronic illness. It’s something I’d known about throughout the years of my own chronic illnesses. Yet somehow, it had never happened to me. That is, until a few weeks ago. What is Medical Gaslighting? The term gaslighting may sound familiar….
2019 was a tough year. Anticipation. Shock. Fear. Worry. Surprise. Love. Anxiety. Relief. Doubt. Amazement. Pride. But I guess 2019 ended up being a pretty good year. Introducing “Bean” Our daughter “Bean” was born on June 12, 2019. Nothing about motherhood is easy. It’s hard. It’s really hard. Chronic illness makes it harder than…
It’s been ages since I’ve written anything on the blog. Six months, to be exact. Life has undergone some fairly significant changes since then. And that story begins back on my birthday. The weather on my birthday is usually cloudy, cool, and dreary. Such is normal for the end of October, and this year,…
I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss something important to me. An assumption, more along the lines of an uneducated opinion, has turned into a war of sorts that is tearing apart my country right now. That something being: not all people who use opioids are drug addicts. The problem with those who…
“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” ~1 Thessalonians 5:18 I had a gratitude journal back during my second year of college. Looking back on it now, I realize how important it was in helping me maintain a valuable perspective on life during what was a…
If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, it should be fairly obvious that I have a painful condition called endometriosis. One of the primary symptoms of endometriosis is chronic pelvic pain. A Bit About Endometriosis Many times the pain from endometriosis is most intense around the time of a woman’s…
