Hi there,1.One quote “Resilience is not what happens after you break. It’s what happens as you’re holding the pieces together.”That line feels right this week. A lot of small pieces being held together right now. 2.One bright spot in the ostomy world Salts Healthcare bought the Ostique Connect app after the company folded. It means people still have that space to connect and talk about life with an ostomy. The more the community grows, the more normal it all feels. That’s a win. 3.One step...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Hi friend, Sleep hasn’t come easy this week. I’ve been going to bed late, waking up early, and feeling like my brain’s stuck in a loop it can’t escape. My WHOOP numbers back it up. Recovery in the mid-teens. High sleep stress. Resting heart rate up. It’s not the travel or the knee recovery. It’s the workload. When I can’t train or play, I pour everything into work. It keeps my mind busy. It also keeps it running at full speed when I should be winding down. Part of it’s where I am. Living in...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Hi friend, Malaysia reminded me how much reps matter. Going into the event, I didn’t have the practice volume I normally like. My knee wasn’t fully ready, I was still figuring out which paddle to use, and the one I ended up playing with, the Typhoon, had been in my hand for about 30 minutes total. That combination alone meant I wasn’t going in with the usual confidence that comes from thousands of clean touches. When you don’t have the reps, you start to feel it mid-match. Timing’s just a...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Hi friend, An interesting quote I came across this week “We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.” — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His book Siddhartha is about a man’s search for meaning. This line stood out to me. It feels like recovery right now. The grind’s already started. I’ve got 200 leg lifts to get through each day and those are fine....
11 days ago • 4 min read
Hi friend, Tomorrow’s knee surgery is experiment number one. A 6 a.m. start at Lourdes Hospital, hopefully just a quick trim and scope. If all goes well, I’ll be walking out by noon and right into rehab mode. I’ve got a day 1–14 plan that’s dialed in from the last time I went through this:• Ankle pumps to keep blood flow moving and prevent clots.• Quad sets to start firing the muscle again.• Heel slides for flexion.• Leg lifts to build strength back before the quad completely atrophies. I...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Friend! This tournament forced me to do something I’ve never done before: take two medical timeouts. One when my knee locked up. Another when the heat and fatigue caught up. Add in the fact that I’m still adjusting to life with an ostomy, working around a torn meniscus, playing with a new paddle for only the second day, playing in brutal conditions, and the weekend became less about winning and more about managing. That’s not the way I want to compete. And that’s on me. The lesson I’m...
15 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Friend,We lost the quarterfinal to Ben and Alshon. We took the first game, and then twenty minutes in my body started shutting down. Breathing went tight. Vision narrowed. I threw up clear liquid on the court, took a medical timeout, and finished the match on fumes. Indoors yesterday I could have played forever. Outdoors today, the Malaysian heat cooked me alive. And it's not that I can’t handle heat. I have always loved it. Growing up in Georgia, I would go run in the middle of summer...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hi friend, I woke up yesterday wrecked. Fever. Right ear felt like it took a roundhouse. Throat swollen, nodes up on the right, head pounding. I still played clean pickleball, which only made it more maddening. It made me question why I keep putting myself through this at forty with Crohn’s, an ostomy, and a body that never seems to stop breaking. I ditched the dusty Airbnb and moved into a cleaner studio with hot water. I don’t know if the last place had mold, but I didn’t get sick until I...
20 days ago • 2 min read
Hi there, Saturday in Manila reminded me how different life runs out here. The plan was simple: see the colorectal surgeon, pay, and move on. What actually happened looked more like this: Wait thirty minutes just to get in the elevator. Give up, take the 11 flights of stairs. Arrive very sweaty. Make it eleven floors up, only to find out the doctor was cash only. No problem, right? Until both hospital ATMs rejected my card. Back down eleven floors. Walk the streets hunting for an ATM that...
22 days ago • 1 min read