Don’t miss  Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s new story “Bali Belly and the Zombie Apocalypse,” up today on World Hum, the best travel-zine in the Ethernet. Linda spins a spooky tale that will make you rethink your travel medicine bag. She proves, once again, that old travel-writers’ saw: Anything that doesn’t kill you is  fodder for great […]

  Am I Crazy? As an autoimmune patient with APS, as a stroke  survivor on blood thinners, people sometimes ask why I travel to places teeming with opportunities for disaster. “Places where medical care is thin, the water is often unsafe and the food chancy; places with infectious diseases, malarial mosquitoes, venomous snakes and the […]

  It’s a jungle out there and I just can’t get enough of it! Come help me celebrate publication of my story “Why I Still Travel to the Wild” at a book party sponsored by Left Coast Writers. It’s  on Monday evening, November 14, at 6 pm at Book Passage San Francisco store at the […]

The Australians call them ‘mozzies’–such a cute name–as though mosquitoes were just pesky little creatures that buzz and bite, one of the minor annoyances of venturing off the beaten track. I used to think of them that way, too, until I started traveling to the tropics and meeting people who’d had malaria, dengue fever (its […]

Here’s a great opportunity to learn more about autoimmune disease: a free public forum in San Francisco on Saturday, August 20, at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel. Details at:  http://sanfranpublicforum.eventbrite.com/ Rita Baron-Faust, Author of The Autoimmune Connection, will speak on “Women and Autoimmunity: Making the Connection,” and Virginia. Ladd,  President and Executive Director […]

  In May, I posted on the benefits of Vitamin D as a way to help reduce the risk of blood clots – as a stroke and APS (antiphospholipid syndrome) patient, that’s  always on my mind. Now a new study, reported in Internal Medicine News, has linked low Vitamin D to increased musculoskeletal pain. The […]

There’s a thought-provoking article from Associated Press on the wire this week: Alzheimer’s debate: Test if you can’t treat it? The gist of the debate is this: with today’s more sophisticated tests–such as the diffusion MRI–it’s easier for doctors to identify brain damage (in the form of plaques) that might suggest someone is developing Alzheimer’s […]

September offers an unusual opportunity to hear the latest on developments in diagnosis and treatment of Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS) at a free one-hour webinar set for Tuesday, September 6, at 8:00 pm EDT (5:00 pm PDT). The discussion, sponsored by the American Society of Hematology (ASH), will include three presentations: Dr. Mark Crowther (McMaster University) […]

For those of us who take Coumadin  (warfarin), Vitamin K is a boogeyman. That’s because K–found principally in dark leafy green vegetables like kale and Swiss chard and spinach that are supposed to be good for us–can inhibit the blood thinning effects of Coumadin.

  June is APS awareness month – APS, the acronym for Antiphospholipid Syndrome, the blood clotting disorder that caused my stroke nine years ago. I remember feeling like the doomed heroine of a bad sci-fi when I first learned the cause of my stroke – an unpronounceable, incomprehensible disease: ‘Antiphospholipid Syndrome,’ or APS. I’d never […]