Patients For A Moment, #18

Welcome to the 18th edition of the patient-centered blog carnival, Patients For A Moment. The posts submitted were based on the following questions I posed to readers:

What’s Illness Got To Do With It?

What is your relationship to illness? Is there a particular time when you wish illness wasn’t in the picture? Or is there a time when you find it’s easy to forget about illness?

Illness can be good and bad, and provide a wide range of emotions and experiences. For all, living with illness is a delicate balance, to be sure.

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What would it be like without illness?

Kathy, from the blog Making Noises, describes in the form of a poem, how creative endeavors help her escape illness and allow her to be “a sick chick no more”, in the post, Behind the lens.

Duncan Cross, from the blog of the same name, describes his relationship with illness like Ike and Tina Turner, in the post What’s illness got to do with it? Duncan wishes that illness wasn’t part of the picture, but it is.

In the post Ahead in the Game, Behind in Life, Brittney of The Road I’m On, talks about what it means to be a veterinary student living with chronic illness. Without illness, she says she’d be ahead in just about everything, but illness makes getting ahead difficult.

Elisabeth Greenwood, from the blog Redefining “Good”, suggests that illness is always there, like a pet, creating an unbreakable bond, in the post Fessing Up.

Annie Martin, and the blog It’s Time To Get Over How Fragile You Are, takes the good with the bad in the post Life With A Side Of Illness or Illness With a Side of Life?

Thank you for letting me be myself

In the post To Be, Or Not To Be,…, Maria from My Life Works Today, explores her relationship with illness, and suggests that many of the uncertainties she faces would be the same even if she didn’t have lupus.

Helen, from the blog Pens and Needles, writes about the future and efficacy, or lack thereof, of contingency plans, and how we have to rely on ourselves and our innate ability to get through anything in the face of illness, in the post Big Plans.

In the post The kindest of friends, Sandra, from the blog Healing Environmental Illness, puts a positive spin on the illness experience by examining all of the lessons that illness has taught her.

In a thought provoking post entitled The Perverse Benefit of a Diagnosis, Lisa Emrich of the blog Brass and Ivory, describes how having rheumatoid arthritis gives her the possibility of trying medications that may potentially help her multiple sclerosis, as well.

Pain pain, go away…

In the post Making Pain Go Away, Barbara Kivowitz of In Sickness and In Health, explores the trials and tribulations of titrating the dosage of medication, and what it means to not be in pain.

Jolene, from the blog Graceful Agony, beautifully expresses that while chronic pain becomes a part of everything we do, it is simply what we feel and not who we are, in the post Feelings of Uselessness.

Fibro Mom, from Fibro World, explores the question of whether there is a cure for chronic pain, in the post Fibromyalgia Is Not For The Fainthearted.

And finally, Kelly Young, Rheumatoid Arthritis Warrior, explains What Is it Like to Live with Rheumatoid Arthritis? Part 3: Communication Failure, in a post that suggests how hard it is to explain RA and its varied symptoms to others.

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Thanks to all those who submitted posts for this edition of PFAM. I really enjoyed reading them, and the insights that you shared.

The next edition of PFAM will be hosted by Duncan Cross on March 10th.