It was perfect weather for the beach on Sunday, sunny, in the 80s F, and given that we hadn’t made it to the Atlantic this season, we grabbed the chance for a day trip to Block Island. An hour’s ferry ride from the Rhode Island coast, it was our favorite vacation spot for years with […]

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Over the past few months I have endured a series of diagnostic tests to figure out the cause of my chronic diarrhea. The basic hypothesis is that my scleroderma has caused waste to move more slowly through my gut, leading to bacterial overgrowth. But my GI specialist, Dr. H, has been thorough, trying to rule […]

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There’s a word in Japanese for the light that filters through trees: Transliterated as komorebi (kō-mō-reh-bee), it is made up of the Japanese characters for tree, leaking, and sun—meaning, literally, the sunlight that leaks through trees. Komorebi refers to the ever-shifting way that sunlight filters through tree branches and boughs, creating dancing patterns on the […]

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One of the best things about summer is that my finger ulcers tend to heal. For months I was dealing with as many as six bandaged fingers, changing those bandages twice daily. It took at least a half-hour each time I changed dressings and used up a lot of bandages. Now, happily, I’m down to […]

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Sunday night I started my new steroid inhaler, Breyna. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, my pulmonologist, Dr. A, who follows me for interstitial lung disease (ILD), felt this was necessary, given a slight drop in my PFT that was concerning. I held off until this week because I needed to discuss the […]

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And now, a detour from scleroderma and related complexities . . . As I shared back in March, my World War I historical novel, Line of Flight, at long last has found a publisher, Köehler Books. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working with their excellent team, preparing for publication on November 17. […]

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As a child, I used to watch a public TV program about Japanese brush painting, and I learned how to paint the images that the artist demonstrated. It has been a dream for decades to travel to Japan. And so, for two weeks in June, Al and I made that dream come true. Back home […]

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Memorial Day weekend is over, so that means unofficial summer has arrived (even if it doesn’t feel that way on a chilly afternoon). Al and I will be traveling again soon, and I am looking forward to getting away. In preparation, I was at AAA recently and noticed a sign for TSA PreCheck®. Unbeknownst to […]

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For months, now, my gut has been unhappy. Al and I both got the flu over the winter, and ever since, I’ve been having diarrhea most days, often several times a day. This is not a new issue, and I’ve discussed it at length with my Boston Medical rheumatologist, who has explained how scleroderma affects […]

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My extremely dry eyes, due to Sjogrens Disease, have been giving me a lot of trouble of late. No matter how carefully I manage my set of eye drops to keep them moist and clear, inevitably they begin to blur within a few hours, especially when I’m writing at the computer. It is incredibly frustrating, […]

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