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….
It’s no secret among individuals with dysautonomia that sometimes we have trouble getting around. When your autonomic nervous system doesn’t function properly, it can make standing for a few minutes or walking a short distance seem like a few years or a thousand miles. But believe it or not, convincing a dysautonomiac to actually…
One of the worst feelings you can experience as a chronically ill person is invalidation. It’s not necessarily that others don’t believe you (although that is also a tremendous problem and a discussion for another time), but that they either don’t see or don’t understand how much your illness(es) impact your daily life. Especially…
I was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) about four months ago. (Is that all? Really? *checks calendar* Blast it all. This has been the longest four months of my life.) In a stroke of luck, my diagnosis came only a month or so after the onset of symptoms, which I inadvertently described some…
via Daily Prompt: Denial I’m in denial about something. Although it’s not something you’d think any person would be in denial about. Obviously, I’m unwell. POTS has taken over my life in a bad way. I’m trying to get better, but the prognosis isn’t all that great. I may never fully recover, but I’m…
I’m awake since I feel a bit sick right now. Nausea has become a fairly common occurrence during my days now, likely from all the salt tablets I’m ingesting…and all the food I’m not ingesting. I really don’t care, either. So, it’s been a bit since I really updated at all because I’ve been…
This will be a weekly post of the most random of random questions to answer- to share my world! Thanks to Cee’s blog for being the brainchild behind this! Ever ran out of gas in your vehicle? No, but I had to rescue my husband one time when he did, at midnight on his birthday….
