Celebrate With Me — Candace J. Semien

What would you do if you were stuck in the grocery store parking lot, crippled by locked joints? Imagine your hands and wrists frozen after parking the car, with toes cramped, shifted apart, and bent. Perhaps your ankle rests painfully against the floorboard. You fear that shifting your weight could…

As months turn into years and years turn into decades of living with systemic lupus erythematosus, we begin to record what helps mitigate or temper symptoms before they turn into a full-blown flare. In fact, it often feels like we have an entire armamentarium of health strategies we rely…

“If you don’t answer to anyone, you will start lying to yourself,” a financial consultant once explained to me. His wisdom, albeit a bit sharp in tone, transcended his focus on money management into my focus on health and disease management.  In explaining how to see results in money…

Pain wakes me at 3:18 a.m., reminding me that lupus stopped me from working. “Yeah, I know,” I sleep-whisper and stare at the digital clock until box breathing cools me back to sleep. An hour later, 4:30 a.m. is on the clock, and inner-me rebuts, but it didn’t end…

It seems like there should be some decisions a person never has to make for themself. Standing before the consultation window at the pharmacy, I found myself faced with a question that made me wonder: Is this a real question? Am I supposed to know the answer to this, too?…

I think I’ve fallen in a “Doctor Who” rabbit hole. If you’ve ever watched the show, you know the TARDIS, whose letters stand for time and relative dimension in space. On the outside, it looks like a simple blue British police box, plain and unassuming. But step inside,…

May is Lupus Awareness Month, and for several reasons, Fred Rogers and his eponymous children’s program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” are on my mind. Fifty-six years ago this month, Mr. Rogers provided testimony to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications seeking to protect $20 million in federal funding for the…

Like any relationship, a patient-doctor one has rules about how to engage and communicate. They’re typically in writing, bearing the patient’s signature of agreement. I’ve seen the rules posted on walls as the U.S. Patient Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, but there are also unspoken rules around trust and admiration.

We’ve heard it said that “you can’t pour from an empty cup.” It’s a reminder to “fill” ourselves before we “pour out” for someone else. Pouring out is an action we do to improve someone else’s life. That improvement could be momentary or it could affect them for a lifetime.

Among the various time-management strategies is one where a person breaks up their day into 30-minute blocks and assigns tasks or activities for each block of the 24 hours. Some bullet journalists consider time blocking to be one of the most effective ways to stay productive. I tend to…

It’s so easy to jump on the woe-is-me, this-isn’t-fair, what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this bandwagon and shout, kick, and scream at the awful “bad luck” and horrible timing of chronic, incurable sickness.   Feeling like a victim and falling into grief can seem inescapable when unprovoked pain, flares of skin rashes, hair…

As one year ends and another begins, many employers give job performance evaluations. That’s when, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, they or their supervisors commend workers for the impact they’ve made on the company and any recognizable or measurable outcomes they’ve helped produce. It’s also…