While I often mention how I'm doing at the start of blog posts on other topics and in my chronic illness vlogs, I thought it was time for a more comprehensive update. Besides, we just passed the halfway point for the year (!!), so the timing is right. The last time I focused on my own health here on the blog was My 2023 Year in Review back in February, so I'm due for an update! NOTE: My updates below refer to ratings of how I feel. For details on how I simply track how I feel on a calendar, check out my post, My Progress in 2020 and Goals for 2021 and scroll down to My Health in 2020 ..read more

On the 4th of July, with temperatures in the high 90's here, we escaped to a movie theater to see the third movie in John Krasinski's Quiet Place series, an origin story called A Quiet Place: Day One. First, let's get some misconceptions out of the way. I don't like horror movies. Although these movies are about an invasion of gruesome aliens that hunt by sound, like its predecessors, this movie is a quiet (very quiet!) character study, with plenty of emotional depth, insights about humanity, and heart. And, yes, there are some gross and very dangerous aliens, too. Check out my earlier review ..read more

I absolutely love when a book I enjoyed is adapted into a TV show or movie, so I was incredibly excited to hear that Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (my review at the link) was going to air on Apple TV. This is one of my all-time favorite books, a twisty sci fi thriller, and so far, the TV adaptation, Dark Matter, is living up to its source material. Jason Desson, played by Joel Edgerton, is happily married to Daniela, played by Jennifer Connelly, and they both adore their teen son, Charlie, played by Oakes Fegley. They live in Chicago, and Jason works as a physics professor at a small, local col ..read more

One of the top ME/CFS specialists, Dr. Kaufman of the Center for Complex Diseases in California, published a paper with a colleague in 2022 about a supplement that has shown stunning results in his ME/CFS and long-COVID patients. The supplement is oxaloacetate, and in an informal "proof of concept" study (i.e. not a placebo-controlled study), his team gave the supplement at various doses to patients with ME/CFS and long-COVID over six weeks and assessed changes in fatigue scores, using a standard scoring guideline. Results showed significant improvement in both groups of patients (22-28% in ..read more

My browser has about 40 open tabs right now (!), and many of them are recent news or research on ME/CFS, long-COVID, and related conditions that I want to share with you. If only there were more hours in a day (or I didn't have to waste two of them napping every day)! So, here, I've compiled some fascinating recent (in the past few years) research into Orthostatic Intolerance in these conditions. Orthostatic Intolerance or OI is an integral part of ME/CFS--over 97% of ME/CFS patients have some form of OI (and many of those with long-COVID, EDS, fibro, MS, and Lyme, too). So, if you have ME/C ..read more

I thought many of you would enjoy a books video I made this week, featuring 30 different books--all of which I've enjoyed--that were either written by a disabled author or feature a character with some sort of illness or disability. There is something here for everyone! The books I included cross all types and genres, fiction and nonfiction. There are even quite a few books by or about ME/CFS (including great, fun novels!). If you struggle to read these days because of your illness, I listened to many of these on audio, and there are lots of middle-grade and YA novels included here, too, whi ..read more

There are a few Best Picture Oscar nominees that I've had my eye on, waiting for them to be available on the streaming services we have, and this weekend, I noticed that The Holdovers was available on Amazon Prime. It was just as good as I'd heard, funny and warm. Paul Hunham, played by Paul Giamatti, is a grumpy, strict ancient civilizations teacher at a private boys' boarding school in 1970 Massachusetts. This Christmas, he's drawn the short straw and is assigned to remain at the school with the "holdovers," those students who must stay on campus for the holiday break. He had no plans to go ..read more

Life has been hectic lately, but I did manage to record a vlog last week. My chronic illness vlogs are a little peek into my life with ME/CFS, an honest view of what my life with chronic illness is like on a typical week (though it hasn't been typical lately, with all the travel!). As you'll see in the vlog, I am still crash-free in 2024 (yay!), but I had a string of days last week when I was feeling run-down and had very low energy. I figured it out (yeast again - duh), and getting stricter on my diet helped me get back on track. You can watch the video on YouTube (the link to YouTube also ..read more

Earlier this week, I participated in a webinar hosted by the Solve ME organization (which, by the way, has loads of great resources for patients and for doctors, in addition to leading advocacy work and funding research). It was called Comparing Immunological Signatures Between Long-COVID and ME/CFS, which was of great interest to me since earlier research has indicated that immune dysfunction is at the heart of ME/CFS, and my own experiences have certainly borne that out. You can check out the schedule of additional upcoming webinars here. On their YouTube page, there is a full playlist of ..read more

While we're mostly watching TV shows on cable right now, we do have a few streaming shows in the mix, and one of our favorites is The Tourist, a twisty, action-packed thriller about a man with amnesia. As the first episode opens, a man, played by Jamie Dornan, is driving through a desolate stretch of Australian desert, listening to the radio, when a tractor-trailer truck comes out of nowhere and hits him violently. He wakes up in the hospital with no memory of ... well, anything. A police officer named Helen Chambers, played by Danielle McDonald, comes to his hospital room to question him abo ..read more