My Sudden Sight is planning a relaunch for March, the National Autoimmune Diseases Month, and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited! 2017 was a year of big shifts and some worrisome setbacks for many of us in the chronic illness community. So for 2018, My Sudden Sight wants to offer a change of pace — and a shift in content. I first launched Sudden Sight back in 2011 as a personal blog about my own experiences recovering from toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN, an aggressive form of SJS) and coping with the return of my rheumatoid arthritis  ...

Let’s talk about grief. When we experience health trauma – be it acute or chronic – our doctors tend to focus on prescribing medication and proscribing lifestyle changes to ease our physical symptoms. What they often overlook are the psychological effects of having your entire life turned upside down. But anyone who has experienced acute or chronic health trauma knows that healing physical symptoms is only part of the coping process. What our M.D. specialists don’t usually explain is the very real grieving period that comes  ...

In case you haven’t heard of the “Spoon Theory” before (and even if you have), please take the time to read Christine Miserandino’s account of how she began to discuss living with chronic illness in terms of having utensils. In essence, the Spoon Theory is a metaphor that sets up health like a bank account (to use another analogy). For most people, sleep and food act like daily direct deposits into this health bank account, so that you can draw out energy as you need it. Proper sleep and diet = an ever-refilling health  ...

When you’re taking a lot of medications, each seems to come with its own set of unpleasant side effects. Often, they tend to wreak havoc on your digestive system, creating the need for more medications to alleviate discomfort. Through all my years of dealing with various prescriptions, I’ve found that keeping a healthy digestive tract helps with many side effects. If you can keep the medications moving through your system, your body can take from them what it will use and quickly flush the rest out. This is exactly what the body was designed  ...

Usually, I am a vegan. As of late, I have been… not-quite-so-vegan. Let’s just say I’ve needed certain comfort foods that have most definitely comforted me. I went through a similar process when I got out of the hospital. I’d been vegan for over a year at that point, but was staying at my grandmother’s for recovery. There was no telling Nana that she couldn’t make me macaroni-and-cheese or any number of other Nana Specials for her baby girl. So, I’ve been branch out past veganism again. Today I ate shrimp  ...