Chronic Pain Awareness Month
Did you know that September is pain awareness month? Every September doctors, pain advocates, and patients raise awareness for issues related to living with chronic pain. According to the Cleveland clinic, chronic pain is defined as “pain that is ongoing and usually lasts longer than six months. This type of pain can continue even after the injury or illness that caused it has healed or gone away. Pain signals remain active in the nervous system for weeks, months or years. Some people suffer chronic pain even when there is no past injury or apparent body damage.”
How Heat Therapy Makes Traveling With Chronic Pain Easier
Do You Have Significant Medical Debt? Copay Accumulator Programs Might Be A Cause
Medically complex or chronically ill patients often need expensive and specialized medications and treatments to manage their symptoms and disease. A lot of these medications do not have a generic, so the costs are very high. In order to afford their treatments, many patients utilize copay assistance.
Copay assistance is incredibly helpful for patients except for when their insurance plan has a copay accumulator program. Copay accumulator programs are rampant in the United States. Insurance companies implement them in order to increase their revenue.
What Are Copay Accumulators and How Are They Creating Medical Debt?
Have you heard of Copay accumulator programs? No?
Until recently, I hadn’t either. Copay accumulator programs aren’t well known because they mostly impact chronically ill patients on very expensive medication. This often includes people with autoimmune conditions and rare diseases. Most people don’t even know that these programs are part of their policy!
Do You Have Chronic Pain? Here’s How I Use Heat Therapy To Help Mine
Many of us deal with acute pain and injuries throughout our lifetime, but not everyone is dealt the burden of dealing with chronic pain. Prolonged pain can significantly interfere with life and force you to make changes in order to accommodate it.
There’s no one answer to treating chronic pain. The goal is symptom management and it often takes a combination of therapies and interventions in order to lessen the pain. My pain management plan consists of medication, lifestyle interventions, and modalities such as heat therapy.
What is Fatigue and What Does it Feel Like?
Fatigue is a symptom of many chronic illnesses, but… What is it? What does it feel like?
Fatigue is a feeling of complete exhaustion that does not improve with rest or sleep. It’s muscle weakness and constant tiredness physically, mentally, or both. Fatigue is sometimes described as being the same as extreme tiredness or sleepiness, but it’s far different. Tiredness and sleepiness can be resolved with a nap, whereas fatigue will remain even with a nap and plentiful rest.
Your body doesn’t determine your worth.
Your body doesn’t determine your worth.Full stop.No really, I mean it. If you have a medical device, a feeding tube, if you’re a wheelchair user, if you’re malnourished, if you’re overweight, if you have stretch marks or rolls (ps we all have those), if you’re a BIPOC, if you’re gay, trans, non-binary, or anything in between, YOU ARE STILL WORTHY.
5 Tips for Managing Urgent Health Issues and Chronic Illness Symptoms
Do you ever feel like things are FINALLY into place with your life and then you’re told by a doctor that you need a surgery or have to handle an unexpected health issue immediately so everything else has to go on pause?
Trust me, I’ve been there and it’s so overwhelming.
I felt like I was finally gaining momentum with work when I was told that I needed an urgent tethered cord release surgery. It’s a major neurosurgery that takes to months to recover from. I saw the momentum I was gaining just fizzle out and disappear.
One Easy Way to Practice Gratitude
I know, I know. Everyone preaches that practicing gratitude is important. Strangers and family members that don’t get it seem to throw it at us as if gratitude would cure us. Trust me, I am not here to tell you that it will. I’m here to help you on your journey if gratitude is something you want to practice more, but don’t know how.
How to Deal With Friends That Don’t Understand Your Chronic Illness
There are a variety of ways to handle friends that don’t understand. In my experience, you need to first decide if this is someone that you want to stay in your life.
If so, first I would ask them to sit down and have an open conversation about something important. Make sure they’re in the headspace to have a conversation like this. Don’t bombard them when they’re preoccupied with something stressful in their life. Once you’re sitting down, communicate to them how you’ve been feeling using “I” statements so you’re less likely to make your friend feel defensive or attacked. Talk about what’s been bothering you and if they’re open to it, let them know how they can better support you.
Happiness Isn’t A Destination
Happiness seems to be this elusive thing everyone is striving for. Like it’s an achievement you can obtain if you just work hard enough or reach enough standard milestones. But it’s not. Happiness can be created right now.
“Redefine happiness not as something you experience when you get what you want, but something you feel when you have something meaningful to work toward each day” - Brianna wiest
My Chronic Illness Doesn’t Define Me, I Define It
I used to let my chronic illness define me. What I mean by that is that I felt like that’s all I was. I was an amalgamation of symptoms and diagnoses. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Dysautonomia, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, fatigue, food allergies, chronic pain, all labels that described my state of being because I wasn’t living for anything. I spent my days resting or going to appointments and getting all of my treatments done.
How Mindset Changes Begin
Changes in mindset can be hard and require commitment. They don’t occur immediately. Unfortunately, you don’t just decide that maybe a better mindset is for you one day and then suddenly you’re there. We wish, right?!
What I’ve seen most people struggle with is the HOW. They finally discover that they want to change, but they’re completely lost with where to start.
5-Minute Curly Hair Refresh
Don’t have the energy to do your hair?
Trust me I get it. Maintaining curly hair is worth it, but it takes a LOT of work.
So here I’m going to share with you my little secret to styling my hair on hard days.
Don’t Let Stigma Stop You From Getting The Treatment You Need
So many of us out there resist the interventions we’re told will help us just because we don’t want to be judged or seem lesser than because of the help we need. I find this so intriguing because it’s almost like the ones judging us want us to get better, yet they feel like they have a right to decide the ways in which we try to do so?
Accepting My Illness
When I was diagnosed with my first illness, I fought against it fully convinced that if I worked hard enough, I could get better. This illness would be just a temporary “blip” in my past eventually, I thought. I was angry, bitter, and hyper-focused on every symptom. I’d analyze each one and track them to try and figure out what was wrong, with the intent of discovering a new treatment I could try to bring me closer to healing. This period was filled with terrifying uncertainty, turmoil, and desperation for validation. I felt stuck and also behind at the same time because I wouldn’t do things or start projects because I was waiting until I “got better” first.
What Is Self-Gaslighting and Why Is It Harmful?
Gaslighting is pervasive in the chronic illness community yet it’s hardly talked about regarding how we do it to ourselves.
Everyone often attributes gaslighting to medical professionals and people in our lives that don’t understand us. You know - the ones that tell us it’s in our heads, that we’re too young to be sick, that what we’re experiencing is normal or isn’t possible, or that we need psychological help.
Getting My Physical Therapy License!
I can’t believe I’m saying this but I AM FINALLY A LICENSED PHYSICAL THERAPIST!!!
It brings me to tears every time I think about what this little piece of paper represents. the six hard years, fighting just to pass my classes, balancing meds, IVs, medical tests, and appointments with lectures and labs, it was all worth it.
Divethru Guided Journaling App
The past two weeks I’ve had the privilege to try out the app Divethru. It’s a guided journal app that helps you Divethru what you go thru. The Divethru team works with mental health professionals to create guided journaling exercises to help users take charge of their mental wellbeing.
How Friendships Give You Strength with Chronic Illness
When I was first trying to manage overwhelming symptoms, I felt really lost. Suddenly, life became confusing and isolating. I felt like I couldn’t relate to my friends and classmates anymore, but I also felt like I was dealing with more than I could handle entirely by myself.