Category: Health

  • Hello World

    This isn’t an easy post for me to write. I hadn’t planned on writing it yet, but then on October 2nd, 2015 I gave a talk and while I knew what is in my slides, I didn’t realize I was outing myself while I was speaking. I guess I was just in the zone. This…

  • Managing Chronic Illness While Working

    Managing Chronic Illness While Working

    Shortly after I developed my vestibular disorder, I began working remote, from home. Even before that, my employer accommodated me by letting me work from home if I ever had a really bad vertigo day. For the last two years, all my work has been remote, until this month. I’ve now figured out that I…

  • Human Operating Systems

    When I speak with people about my chronic illness, there is often confusion on it. Many people think, “your pain [or dizziness] is just in your head” and that I can just let it go or ignore it. Yes, my disabilities are invisible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very real. When we meet people…

  • On Depression

    Society has many ills. People are fallible and get themselves addicted to unhealthy things all the time. It may be overeating, under-eating, gambling, alcohol, or drugs, but each of these people is dealing with a pain that their particular addiction gives a little bit of relief from. We recognize that these addictions are diseases; we…

  • Apple Watch Emergency Alerts?

    I live with a person who has a very severe allergy to fish and shellfish. So much so that going out to dinner is extremely hard. She carries an epipen in case she is exposed, and it can be as little exposure as walking into a restaurant having a fish fry. I have malignant hyperthermia,…

  • I think I’ll call him Phil

    It always starts at my cheek. It crawls behind my eyes and tugs on my nose. Unmonitored, it will push tears out then start chipping away at my teeth. It threads a needle through my left eye and pulls on the string making me lose focus and balance.

  • Optimizing Working Remote

    Optimizing Working Remote

    For the last eighteen months, I have been working remotely from my home in Wisconsin for a startup located in San Francisco. This has been one of the greatest adventures I have had in my life; learning a tremendous amount about the world of startups, better coding practices, how to make a remote environment work,…

  • Let’s Talk Protein

    I have been a vegetarian or vegan for a nearly 10 years. I first chose to be a vegetarian after having read The China Study. My family has a history of heart disease and cancer, and I was following the same path as my father who had a heart attack at 41. The China Study…

  • Single Payer Healthcare

    Single Payer Healthcare

    I’m pretty lucky. I have a solid career and reliable income. I also have health insurance through my employer, unlike millions of other Americans. However, something happened this week that scared the hell out of me. I caught pneumonia.

  • Learning to Let Go

    In the Beginning… For ten years I have been dealing with chronic pain in the form of daily, debilitating migraines. Unlike some people who get migraines every couple of months that may last a few hours to a few days, my migraines show up every. They come in swaths of anywhere from as few as…