How to Pace Yourself with Chronic Illness
How do you learn to pace yourself with chronic illness? It’s more complicated than just deciding to do things more slowly — there are a lot of emotional aspects to this process, as well as learning a whole new way of leading your life. One of the most frustrating aspects of chronic illness is that…
From Helplessness to Hope with Chronic Illness: 5 Strategies to Push Back Depression
I had a rough entry into the holidays. The fates conspired to send me a number of events over which I had little control. On top of already existing stress, plus having slammed it into overdrive to prepare for the holidays, my body (and mind) had had enough. So I got sick. Or rather, I…
Your Life with RA Is On Sale!
It’s January, a month famous — infamous? — for being full of resolutions and decisions to take charge of your life. My Amazon Bestseller Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Tools for Managing Treatment, Side Effects and Pain is your perfect partner in the quest to become empowered and put yourself in the driver’s seat with…
6 Tips for Setting (and Working Towards) Goals Despite the Unpredictability of Chronic Illness
“That’s why you should never make plans,” she said. “You never know what might happen.” I used to be in that place. It’s a place where you are afraid of planning anything, because of the unpredictability of chronic illness. If you never know how you’ll feel tomorrow, even in an hour from now, forcing you…
Facebook Live: Guilt and Chronic Illness
So many of us feel so much guilt. As you know, I wrote a post about guilt — particularly writer guilt — a little while ago, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I took at the Facebook. In this month’s #AskLene, we talked about guilt, chronic illness, and how to let…
Book Review: Errant Gods (Blood of the Isir)
It’s not often that you read a book in which a character has rheumatoid arthritis (RA). I don’t recall such a character ever being the hero of any story. Errant Gods, the first book in the Blood of the Isir series by Erik Henry Vick, changes all of that. Hank Jensen used to be a…
5 Great Blogs from RDBlog Week
Last week, 31 bloggers came together to write about rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or, as some prefer, rheumatoid disease (RD to reflect the systemic nature of the beast. Every day had a different topic and every day, I’d read through the entries, in awe of the talent and passion of all who participated. Here are five…
Marijuana for Pain: Does It Work?
I never smoked marijuana as a teenager. No, that’s not entirely true. Once, I took one puff, hardly inhaled, and called it quits. Fast-forward four years or so. By this time, we’d moved to Canada, I was in university and we lived in a wonderful house with a backyard adjacent to a ravine. The guy…
The Path to better Treatment: 5 Tips to Get What You Need
“We have to do whatever we can to help our patients function.” – My rheumatologist Both my rheumatologist and my family doctor support my need for treatment that enables me to live my life. That includes prescribing opioids, steroid shots, or thinking outside the box to find solutions. I know that makes me a lucky…
How Michael Kuluva Raises Awareness About RA and Disability Through Fashion
I was really excited to speak with Michael Kuluva, creator of Tumbler and Tipsy, about how he raises awareness of rheumatoid arthritis through his fashion. He also showed us some examples from his 2019 Spring/Summer collection, just fresh off the runway at New York Fashion Week
August #AskLene: Living and Coping with Pain
This afternoon, during my monthly #AskLene, we talked about living with pain and coping with pain. We had a really lively discussion that is continuing on the Facebook post. Do you have a topic you’d like me to talk about in future forecasts? Please leave it in the comments
11 Tips to Deal with Nausea with Chronic Illness
Updated March 29,2020 Queasy. Green around the gills. Nauseated. If you have rheumatoid arthritis (RA), there’s a very good chance you know nausea. For that matter, anyone with autoimmune arthritis or other types of chronic illness probably knows it, too. Between the effects of the condition itself and the medication to treat it, most of…