The sudden thunk, the splat, the flying tomato gore, chunks and shards of glass sailing all the way into the dining room. On the 17th anniversary of my stroke, I’m grateful to remember how far I’ve come. Even with a smashed bottle of salsa and an appointment lost in brain fog.

Hemingway’s favorite painting— Joan Miró’s The Farm—reflects his own spare creative style. The painting was woven into the fabric of Hemingway’s life, from his early days scrimping by in Paris, to the glory days in Key West and Havana, to the sad years of decline when he lost his home in the chaos of two Cuban revolutions. The race to spirit it out of Cuba after the Revolution is worthy of a thriller. Vanity Fair tells the story. This month, The Farm goes on view in a major Miró retrospective in Paris at the Grand Palais museum complex.

In the year or two before my stroke, I was aggravated by mild but annoying memory and cognition problems: forgetting movies I’d just seen or books I’d recently read. Then there were the strange typos when I wrote at my computer.   ‘Height’ was written as ‘right.’ ‘Core’ was written as ‘bore’—rhyming mistakes that didn’t […]

  So far, this has been a three-bears summer where I live in Lafayette, swinging from a too-cold foggy chill to a too-hot swelter with the sun beating down and the temp pushing past 100 degrees. I’m missing those “just-right” days we usually count on at this time of year. The chill is easy to […]

Antiphospholipid Syndrome—APS—is a dangerous blood clotting disorder, and much more common than first thought. It affects some two to six million women in the US—comparable to the number of women living with cancer. So why haven’t you heard of it?

After 16 years and a near-miraculous recovery from stroke, I still too often stand at the edge of my mind, teetering toward the void of missing synapses, staring into the white fog of absence. Of absent memory, yes. But it’s more than that: it’s an absence of self. This is what stroke does.

How I deal with autoimmune flares—itching red rashes, crackly, aching joints, crippling fatigue: first fuming, then rest, and—finally—trying to regain an outward focus

People with blood clotting problems need to be aware of potential dangers with the IVs known as PICC lines. A recent study shows that PICC lines pose a risk for blood clots that can be especially severe for patients who have already had clotting problems.

Sometimes it seems like blood clots rule my life. It was a clot that caused my stroke in 2002, precipitated by the autoimmune clotting disorder antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). APS has a nasty tendency to “re-thrombose” — that’s the medical jargon I read, soon after my stroke, telling me  I was highly likely to have another. […]

Stroke is not a geriatric disease. It’s not confined to overweight smokers who have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. “Those are the most common risks,” according to Steven J. Kittner, M.D., director of the Maryland Stroke Center at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. “But strokes can affect anyone at any […]