We started before sunrise beneath red lights and cold air, walking silently toward Hermit’s Rest while most of the South Rim was still asleep. The entire village felt suspended in time. Empty shuttle stops. Pine trees moving in the dark. The strange calm that exists right before something big
The last time I was in an MRI, I walked out different than I walked in. Not emotionally. Physically. I overheated. My spine felt like it had been lit from the inside. When it was over, I could barely get off the table. Standing took effort. Walking was unstable. The
On double vision, bright light, and practicing the drill where it counts The building at the Anschutz Medical Campus looks like the future decided to major in glass. When I walked into the MS Summit hosted by the Rocky Mountain MS Center, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the
Living with MS: heat, grief, and 12 minutes on the clock This week I fired my neurologist. Not because she was unkind. I’ve flown with aviators across the full spectrum of how Crew Resource Management is practiced. Some were warm. Some were abrasive. You can be blunt and still
I thought I understood Uhthoff’s phenomenon. Heat flares symptoms. Cool down. Reset. Move on. That’s been my pattern. Last week I wrote about seventy-five minutes in an MRI tube. No need to replay it. You were there. What I didn’t understand until afterward was this: It
Two days after the ER told me it was Bell’s Palsy — two days before I understood it was an MS relapse — I was certain I could see loud sounds. Not metaphorically. Visually. When a door shut too hard, my field of vision seemed to vibrate. When someone spoke sharply,
I am not claustrophobic. Let me start there. Elevators? Fine. Airplanes? Fine. MRI tubes? Historically, fine. Open-water swim starts with elbows flying at my face while someone kicks my ribs and a wetsuit strangling my neck? Also fine. When I laid down on the table, my biggest concern was
On motion, balance, and learning what the brain can still trust At the start, everything is tight. Not pain — pressure. It sits above my right eye and stretches laterally, the way your finger would travel if you dragged it slowly toward your right ear. A shallow arc of tension. It
I didn’t go to the neuro-ophthalmologist looking for reassurance. I went because something about how I was seeing the world no longer felt negotiable. By the time I sat in that chair, I wasn’t untreated or untouched by the system. I’d already begun therapy months earlier.
I’d been watching Sesame Street with my five-month-old for months before it finally landed. Not as a revelation or some poetic moment — but as a blunt, humbling realization. Elmo, constantly speaking in the third person, had it more figured out than I did. The show repeats the