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….
