Skip to main content

HAWMC Day 28: I Noticed Something...

So, I noticed something today. I was in the grocery store stocking up on end-of-semester snack foods with my brother and I glanced at my hands. Specifically, the palms of my hands. Do you know what I found? Color. My palms were pink.

This may not make sense to some of you. Let me explain.

Because of Crohn's, I've been severely anemic for the last several years. One way to tell (without a blood test) if you're anemic is if your palms are pink. I learned this when I went to my current doctor for the first time and he asked to look at my (super pale) palms. He then told me, with impressive accuracy, what my hemoglobin count was.

I've been feeling really great recently. Not perfect, of course. There are still rough days, but the good far outnumbers the bad. It's been nearly two years since that doctors visit, and my hands being pink again just seems like such a tangible demonstration of the progress that's taken place in that time.

Pretty cool.

Comments

  1. I don't know if I would recognize your hands if they don't look like porcelain.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exciting News!!

Alright folks, something really and truly exciting is in the works over here. I've been asked to contribute to this really awesome new channel that will center solely around Crohn's Disease. WEGO Health  is this really amazing online community and they're currently launching a series of channels that deal with different diseases/illnesses/ect. For those of you who aren’t familiar with WEGO Health, they’re a different kind of social media company – with a mission to empower the top 10% of online health social media contributors to connect with one another and with healthcare companies. They call those folks Health Activists – but they’re people like me and you who are community leaders, bloggers, on Facebook, on Twitter, leading online forums, and usually “all of the above.” As part of their mission, WEGO Health has recently launched a new Health Activist video platform called WEGOHealth.tv where they are presenting the authentic voice of the online community in the form...

HAWMC Day 2: The Quote(s) That Changed My Life

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. How, in my life, there are a series of identifiable moments when someone said something and it opened up the world in an entirely new way. These are often called "aha moments" in the feminist community. I've had a lot of these moments. Not all of them have been these incredible moments of clarity that allow me to better identify and speak about the injustices of the world, many of them have been much more personal. Instead of these sweeping realizations, they are slight awakenings. This does not mean that they have had a smaller impact, however. In fact, I think these  moments, more than the grand moments, change the way I live my everyday life. I've had a few of these moments in relation to Crohn's, and I know I'm bending the prompt (to pick a quote and write about it) a little bit here, but I'm having a hard time choosing which of these moments was more important to developing my understanding of what...

I'm My Own Woman! But could I get a little help...

I went to this panel/performance at Access Living  last Friday. It was on the intersections between disability, race and community. Very interesting. There was one thing that the moderator said, though, that really struck me. It's something I've read and taken note of before, but for some reason hearing it in this context really drove the point home. He made the point that disability and disease challenge the idea of "the individual." In American society, we're pretty much taught to take care of ourselves. Individualism is extremely important to the way we conceptualize our bodies and our minds. The "I" is at the center of the American dream. If I work hard and educate myself, I can rise through the ranks of society. So, what happens to this concept when a body must depend on others to perform certain tasks, or even to make it through the day? This is more of an issue for some types of disability than others. With Crohn's, for instance, as long a...