3 episodes
The Lady's Illness Library Rachel Katz
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- Health & Fitness
The Lady’s Illness Library is a collection of stories about unconventional illness journeys. Here, you won’t find prescriptive health tips or quick fixes, but exploratory conversations that seek to understand these immense human experiences. Diseases that are multifaceted, sort-of-undiagnosed, and debilitating–think autoimmunity, long COVID, migraine–are more common than ever, affecting majority women. And yet, despite their growing ubiquity, they still live beneath the surface of our culture.
Let’s change that.
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Autoimmune dichotomy: holding grief and joy at the same time
In this heartfelt episode, Rachel sits down with Julia Edelman to discuss her ten-year journey with uveitis, an autoimmune disorder affecting the retina. They explore the roller coaster of emotions Julia has experienced through the medical challenges and numerous surgeries. She expresses difficult emotions, such as feeling like a burden to her caregivers during her procedures, but also shares uplifting experiences like finding creative outlets through her newsletter, dancing, and building onl...
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Living With Migraines: From Control To Creation
What does life look like when frequent migraines sap your energy? How do you find meaning in this context? Host Rachel Katz explores this question with Substack writer Amber Horrox, who shares her journey with chronic illness in her newsletter, Warrior Within. From grappling with the inability to work to overcoming medical skepticism and chronic illness grief, Rachel and Amber cover topics like medical research and trusting personal experiences. Amber's shift in mindset from "control to creat...
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I do deserve to be okay
Ema Hegberg is the extraordinarily thoughtful writer behind Peace of the Whole. She has spent over a decade with varying symptoms, from upper GI issues (feeling like food was getting stuck when she swallowed) to chronic gut problems to Lyme disease and adverse reaction to antibiotics and panic attacks and more. Ema talks eloquently about body awareness and cyclical living, and how she has slowly shaped a new life around those concepts. There is a lot of hope in this conversation, an...