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chronic illness crohn's disease health patients travel wellness

The beast of balance.

If you’ve got 5-minutes, check out this honest and humble piece by Lily Altavena on balancing her Crohn’s disease flare-ups as a student at NYU: When Chronic Illness Interrupts the Rhythms of College.

Lily does a great job of shedding some light on the intensity of living far from home, in a new city, with obligations that sometimes no one else can help you with (even if they really want to). They certainly do add up quickly with the burdens of such a tremendously unpredictable disease and it seems like she handles it all quite stoically.

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patients wellness

Missing the bigger picture, literally.

First, let me apologize. I have been a very bad blogger over the past few months, but I have a great excuse — I was getting married! And then I took a well-deserved break in Indonesia with my new husband for some surfing, sleeping, eating and relaxing.

So while I’m being a bad blogger — and talking about marriage/weddings — I’ll just continue and write a post about something that has nothing, really at all, to do with chronic illness (beyond the fact that it made me sick to my stomach). I read this piece earlier today and could not stop shaking my head in disbelief: Suit Against Photographer Seeks Re-Creation of Wedding After Divorce

Allow me to summarize. A man who was married in 2003 and is now, not surprisingly, divorced from his wife, sued his photographer for missing the last 15-minutes of their wedding. More specifically, the last dance and the bouquet toss. The suit was filed in 2009, six years after they were married at the tipping end of the statute of limitations.

As someone at the beginning of the marriage journey, I just couldn’t believe this story, so I felt obligated to share in the absurdity of it all. But then again, I have amazing pictures of my wedding — and above is what happened in the last 15-minutes instead of the bouquet toss. (Thanks Hunter!)

(above) John and Paul Clark in what was later deemed “Clark and Stormy.”

Categories
food health wellness

Eat well, be well, shop well.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,” Dr. Preston Maring of Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente medical center said. “It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain … We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.”

Amen. Love this piece in the New York Times Dining & Wine section. Seems like a no-brainer to me, but still it is something I don’t hear from doctors enough: “Doctor’s Orders — Eat Well to Be Well.”

BTW, here’s a helpful way to shop well from your home too: ShopWell.com