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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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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For my birthday, a friend who knows me well gave me a copy of Sy Montgomery’s wonderful book Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell. I have a thing for turtles and their slow, measured pace through life. Back when I ran a marketing department for a small college, I used […]

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I turned 72 on Saturday. It was a birthday when I felt my age more than I would have liked. A couple of weeks ago, I aggravated an old lower back injury, trying to do more than I should have. Thought it was resolving, just a bit sore. Then on Wednesday afternoon, after I got […]

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When I am not writing about living with scleroderma or helping my clients with marketing and communications strategy, I pursue my own writing. Fiction, that is—historical fiction, in particular. Back in 2014, I began working on a novel set in World War I about a mother whose estranged daughter runs off with her beau to […]

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I didn’t realize it at the time, but at the end of December, I wrote my 700th post on this site. I launched Living with Scleroderma on January 3, 2012, and have been posting nearly every week since, with time off for good behavior when on vacation. That’s a lot of posts. While there always […]

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