Nearly every night for the past 11 days, I have been reveling in the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. Watching these amazing athletes’ extraordinary feats has been the best antidote to horrible headlines and stress. It has also helped me get through my bout with the flu and the lagging fatigue and residual, annoying cough. I […]

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On Sunday, Al and I went to one of our favorite places, Block Island, an hour’s ferry ride off the Rhode Island coast. We used to vacation there when our daughters were young. Unlike just about anywhere else I can think of, the island remains a time capsule. Many of the same weathered buildings line […]

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I used to think that any plant I touched would surely die. But ever since I planted my bonsai, a Brazilian rain tree, four years ago, I’ve been gratified to discover that I’m actually pretty good at this. My little tree is thriving, especially this summer. New leaves appear almost daily, requiring some careful, frequent […]

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Somewhere I read recently a recommendation that resonated, a way to manage stress. The concept was to “shorten your horizon.” The idea is not to stop setting goals or making plans or other future-oriented tasks. Rather, it’s about adjusting how far to look down the road in anticipation of events. Given all the scary news […]

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I am happy to report that I got through my extraction of a resorbed tooth with no complications last Wednesday—no fun, but it’s done. So I was able to get my spring Covid shot on Friday, also without complications. My lungs have cleared from pneumonia,and I caught up a bit on rest over the weekend, […]

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So, what I thought was “just” allergies last week turned out to be more complicated. When our geriatrics nurse practitioner came to our home for a check-up last week, she carefully listened to my lungs and informed me that I had not developed bronchitis, as I’d thought. No, I had pneumonia. What? That was not […]

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For weeks now, my bonsai, a Brazilian rain tree that I have been cultivating for nearly four years, now, has been shedding leaves. While some of this is to be expected—it’s a deciduous tree, after all—it just seemed out of the ordinary. Nearly every morning, I’d discover more yellow amidst the emerald green. Was I […]

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Bad actors are everywhere these days. Last week, I finally was able, with some tech support, to reinstall my computer virus scanner, run a sweep, and reassure myself that I did not download a virus a few weeks ago when I accidentally opened one of those fake alert screens that scream at you that you […]

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Now that my blood pressure seems to be, thankfully, calming down, the next frontier is healing the infection in my left ring finger. As I’ve written recently, this has been going on for a couple of months, now. Two multi-week courses of Minocyline perhaps helped, but not enough to really clear the infection. So, last […]

The post Adventures with Antibiotics appeared first on Living with Scleroderma.

This weekend, my dear husband persuaded me to get out of the house on a bitter cold Sunday afternoon for a visit to our art museum’s wonderful annual Flora in Winter exhibit. It’s always fun to see how area florists interpret artworks, and given the flood of horrid headlines here in the U.S. of late, […]

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