The Seated View

via GIPHY   I am not known for having a pristine home. Clean, yes. Tidy? Not so much. And this has two causes. One, tidying up is not in my top priorities. It doesn’t really hold much interest for me and besides, I usually know exactly where things are in the piles. Once it’s cleaned up, that’s when I get lost. But it’s also not a top priority because I have limited energy. If I spend it on tidying, I rarely get anything else done. So I make a choice to live in what can best be described as organized chaos. The second cause of the chaos is my disability. I can’t do much of the physical labour involved in cleaning and tidying up. For one, I can only reach my furniture at a certain level. This means that tables and other surfaces are used as horizontal filing areas. It also makes it very difficult to organize and Put Things Away. I do have attendants coming in, but the time I have tends to be used for other things. As well, cleaning with someone really only works...

  I used to think that all the emphasis on raising money for a cure for rheumatoid arthritis was a waste of time. This disease was incurable. All the research in the world couldn't help. Boy, was I wrong! I now firmly believe that we will see a cure in my lifetime.  In my new post for RAHealthCentral, I look at the new studies that are exploring how to stop RA before it starts . Doesn't that just blow your mind? "Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could stop rheumatoid arthritis (RA) before it develops, before it starts wreaking havoc in our bodies? Does that sound like science fiction or a fairy tale? It isn’t. It’s getting closer to becoming a reality. A bit of background Five years ago, I listened to Edward C. Keystone, M.D., F.R.C.P(C) one of the foremost rheumatologists in Canada, talk about how the anti-CCP blood test was leading us toward a bright new future. Because the anti-CCP test can detect RA up to 15 years before it starts, he said it was ...

Once a year for Halloween, we dress up and pretend to be someone else. But when you live with a chronic illness, the pretending happens every day, as we tried to act like everything's better than it is. And it can really mess with your life. This week on RAHealthCentral, I wrote about this pretending and share tips on what you can do to live authentically with chronic illness : "Pretending to be someone you’re not is not just for Halloween when you have a chronic illness. It’s something we do every day, trying to put a better face on life and how we’re really feeling. We do it because of the stigma of chronic illness . We do it because a bit of daily denial can be a coping mechanism, allowing us to get through the day. And we do it because we want our lives to be about something other than just being sick. The problem with pretending is that it can take over our lives. There is a fine line between putting on a smile so you can get through the day without explain...

Atticus O’Sullivan lives a mostly quiet life in Tempe, Arizona with Oberon, his Irish wolfhound. He runs an occult bookshop, hangs out with his friends, and his biggest problem is a cranky neighbour. Well, and that he’s been hiding from Aenghus Óg, the Celtic god of love for well over a thousand years and that his closest friends are a werewolf and a vampire. Perhaps I forgot to mention that Atticus is a druid and 2000 years old, give or take a few years? Oh, and that although the books take place in our world, there is also another very richly developed, as well as very hidden, world filled with supernatural beings, such as several pantheons of gods, some werewolf packs, and a lively vampire community. But there is only one druid. All the rest are gone, most of them killed during Roman times during an extermination of sacred groves and druids masterminded by the vampires and executed by the Romans. And that’s just the background story and the beginning of Ho...