Cross-condition articles on living with and tracking chronic illness — symptoms, patterns, and preparing for appointments across conditions.
lupus
Lupus · Symptom Tracking A Lupus Symptom Checklist to Bring to Your Next Appointment It's the night before your rheumatology appointment, and you're typing "lupus symptom checklist" into a search bar because you already know that by the time you're sitting across from
Fibromyalgia
Fibromyalgia · Chronic Pain Why Bad Weather Really Does Seem to Make Fibromyalgia Worse You feel it before the weather app does. A dull ache moves into your shoulders and hips a day before a front rolls in, and by the time the rain starts, you already knew it was coming.
pots
POTS · Dysautonomia 8 min read POTS and Activity Crashes: What to Record After Post-Exertional Symptoms You did the grocery run on Tuesday. One store, twenty minutes, one flight of stairs with the bags. Nothing that should have mattered. By Wednesday afternoon you were flat on the couch, heart pounding
lupus
If you have lupus, you have probably been told to rest more. It is some of the least useful advice in medicine, because it assumes the problem is that you are doing too much.
lupus
The morning of the appointment, your hands feel almost normal. Which is its own kind of cruel, because for three weeks they were stiff and swollen and you could barely open a jar.
Brain Fog
You walked into the kitchen and forgot why. You lost the word for a spoon mid-sentence. Then the appointment comes, the doctor asks how your concentration has been, and all you can offer is "not great" — because brain fog is the one POTS symptom that leaves no number behind.
pots
Most POTS content treats the condition as one thing and gives the same advice to everyone: more salt, more fluids, compression socks, exercise reconditioning. That advice is correct — for some subtypes. For others, parts of it can make things worse.
autoimmune
Every medical student learns the same picture: a "butterfly rash," bright red, spread across the cheeks and nose. It is one of the most recognizable images in medicine.
MCAS
If you have been through several specialists without a clear answer, you are not imagining things and you are not a mystery. MCAS is genuinely difficult to catch — not because clinicians are careless, but because of how the condition behaves.
MCAS
You have already cut aged cheese, leftovers, tomatoes, spinach, wine, vinegar, fermented everything. Maybe avocado too, because someone in a forum said so. Your safe-food list has shrunk to something you could write on the back of a receipt — and you are still flaring.
pots
You have been told it is anxiety. Or dehydration — have you been drinking enough water? Maybe stress, or deconditioned muscles, or a panic disorder that nobody can quite pin down. The tests keep coming back normal.
lupus
The appointment is over. You drove home somehow. The rheumatologist explained a lot — medications, follow-ups, blood panels — and by the time you got to the car, most of it had already started to blur. That is not a personal failing.