• Be Gruntled

    You would think my hardest days are the ones when I am curled up in a ball in bed, crying in pain and throwing up. They’re not. The hardest days are the ones when I’m stuck in bed with mild symptoms – headache, nausea, fatigue and weakness. On those days, it’s the mental battle that… Read more

  • Give Yourself a Break

    I was standing at the kitchen sink, washing dishes and thinking about this blog post. My head was hurting so much but I was pushing through the pain to simply get the job done when the irony hit me – here I am mentally writing a post encouraging people to stop over-doing, while I’m over-doing… Read more

  • The Next Thing

    I started a new therapy to try to address Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. There’s always a level of excitedment that comes with new treatment protocols. I want to be hopeful, and I felt the effects of the first dose almost immediately so that hope is definitely on the rise. BUT there is also a level… Read more

  • How Can I Help

    Max Goodwin, the Medical Director of New Amsterdam Hospital (yes, another tv reference) when faced with employees who are frustrated and complaining, asks one question: “How can I help?” In these chaotic and somewhat frustrating times, it’s so easy to get sucked into debates about statistics and get frustrated with the way people are (or… Read more

  • Daring Greatly — the battle over shame

    Brene Browns best seller, Daring Greatly, is one of about a dozen books I flip back and forth between. But today I realized several of these books I’ve chosen have a similar underlying theme – shame. Shame affects every one of us, and yet we choose to pretend it doesn’t exist. It affects the way… Read more

  • Apollo 13 – what events may transpire

    Today marks the 50th anniversary of the return of the Apollo 13 astronauts to earth. So, in true Hollywood form, there have been documentaries and space movies on all day – and in true Shawn form, the stories have me comparing chronic sickness to the “successful failures” of space travel. In all these stories, there… Read more