Blog Articles About Chronic Illness

5 Tips on Helping a Parent with Chronic Pain or Illness: A Guestpost & Giveaway by Elizabeth M. Cristy

Do I have a treat for you today! A wonderfully informative guest post by Elizabeth M.Christy’s a.k.a. The PotomacFalls Mama on what you can do to help that friend or member of your family who is parenting with a chronic illness. And! A giveaway of her excellent new book Why Does Mommy Hurt? Helping Children…

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The Freedom to Eat

I have a variety of food allergies, some of which require me carrying an EpiPen in case I have an anaphylactic reaction. And it’s had a profound impact on my socializing. I don’t eat out much anymore. There are no ironclad guarantees in a restaurant. They’ll try their best, but until someone opens a nut…

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No Spoons. No Writing. No Problem??

I crashed last weekend. Well, to call it simply a crash may be the understatement of the decade. Sure, this had many similarities to what happens when my body finally has had enough of being pushed beyond its limits and makes me sit still (usually while it mutters invectives): the dizzy, the exhausted, the sort…

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No, Really. Stay Home.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the theory about why it’s important to stay home when you’re sick. Today, I’ll be sharing the real life story of what happens when someone who has RA and is on an immunosuppressant gets “just a cold.” Two weeks ago, I picked up a cold. It’s…

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Muddying the Waters

Late Monday night, through a perfect storm of triggering factors, I experienced a nasty migraine aura, the likes of which I haven’t had in a very long time. This was no namby-pamby aura. No, this was the kind that came with flashing lights and shapes obscuring half of my visual field, leaving me with a…

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Thoughts of Suicide and RA

Chronic illness and depression go hand-in-hand and so it is with RA. According to Johns Hopkins, chronic pain exacerbates depression and from an intellectual standpoint, it’s not surprising that some of those people who are depressed consider suicide. And some do more than consider. But this is not an intellectual post that delves into the…

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Giving Thanks

I had a plan. This plan has been in the works for months and was directly related to The Boy and I going to the Toronto Islands with the intention to commit photography (our idea of romance). It never really happened in the Spring and then it got too warm — not for me, The…

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What Okinawa’s 80% and Mary Kay Taught Me about Writing with Chronic Illness

Updated September 28, 2021 I ran out of spoons around the middle of June. Then I spent the next six weeks teetering on the line between having just a few and being deep in energy overdraft, while mentally (and repeatedly) chanting just hold on until August 1 and not quite understanding why I was flaring…

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Winner – Chronic Resilience Giveaway

Thanks so much to everyone who entered the giveaway for a chance to win a copy of  Chronic Resilience: 10 Sanity-Saving Strategies for Women Coping with the Stress of Illness by Danea Horn. All of you wrote beautiful, thoughtful replies that I am sure will be helpful for those who are new to the disease…

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5 Gifts that Come from Chronic Illness – Guestpost & Giveaway

Last week I interviewed Danea Horn about her new book for HealthCentral. Danea  agreed to do a guest post for The Seated View and generously offered to give away a copy of Chronic Resilience: 10 Sanity-Saving Strategies for Women Coping with the Stress of Illness. This is a great book that has lots of real,…

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Learning from Chronic Illness

This is my CreakyJoint post for this week…   Living with a chronic illness — any chronic illness — is an excellent teacher. It may not be a learning environment most of us would choose, but once there, living through the experience can teach you some important new skills. Balancing everything that goes into living…

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Perfectly Imperfect

Perfectly Imperfect is my post for CreakyJoints this week What is the value of a person? Does a chronic illness detract from that value? Is there such a thing as perfect health? About a month ago, Ms. Meniscus answered a question from a woman with RA whose future mother-in-law had offered her $25,000 to not…

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