My first ever tonic-clonic seizure arrived at a beautiful destination wedding in Spain. Thankfully, it had the good sense not to crash...

I am a rubber ball a child has thrown haphazardly across the room, and I am pinballing off of surfaces and corners, painting a jagged...

The first and only time I got pregnant, I got pregnant twice at the same time because when I do things, I do them BIG. It was a Time....

I am in the backyard examining the bright orange and yellow underbelly of the heart rot mushroom, chicken of the woods, growing at the...

I’m sitting in the waiting room at my nephrologist’s office and staring at the large bulletin board beside the reception desk. The board...

Look both ways before crossing the street, always chew before you swallow, don’t talk to strangers. These are the first basic lessons I...

During dinner recently, my ten-year-old son Ryan told me his fifth-grade class was learning about communicable diseases. It was a hard...

On the radiation table, there is a moment when I can see the top part of my body outlined by green light. This is not the first time this...

When I was 14, I shaved one of my eyebrows off. In an impatient attempt to become beautiful, my hand slipped. After blinking a few times...

Advantage: I am a student of the Earth, reading old folklore about which herbs help rheumatism, investigating bird species and their...

They say a person with chronic illness only has so many spoons to get through each day. Each action, each sentence, each movement takes a...

Next to my desk at work, there is a picture of me with my three daughters standing in front of stone formations of South Dakota’s...

Point six of the Black Panther Party’s 1972 iteration of the Ten-Point Program clearly states: We want “completely free health care for...

After you turned sixteen and your body came into its own and I said you looked voluptuous and your father said you were getting a bit...

Naked except for a paper-thin gown, I sit in a room like so many others that have stripped me of my identity. Cold. Sterile. White walls....

Mere weeks after Hurricane Irma raged her way through Atlanta in the month of September, 2017, I sat on the patient bed of my local...

The wild lorikeet sits on the branch outside the library. I read its colors like the gaudy cover of a book. It’s not a native bird. An...

When I was fourteen, my spine was pinned with twenty-two screws and pinched with two ten-inch rods to correct my scoliosis that had...

I lived with my disability for five years before I found it existed. The comments started in high school. When I was in class and a...

I have a three-inch scar on my left forearm, winding thin and white across my yellow-brown skin. The dog who gave it to me, with his...