It’s great to be recognised with ‘The Chronically Hopeful Award’ which Pamela Jessen from There is Always Hope has created, by Barbara McLullich from ‘BACKPAINBLOGUK’ who is a fellow blogger, advocate, and chronic friend.
Thank you, Barbara, for honouring me with this award it means a lot when recognised by fellow peers for the work that we do within the communities for chronic and invisible diseases. It is also, really, great to be nominated by you because you are one of fibroflutters.com top chronic bloggers with your posts being viewed all the time across the globe. We thank you for writing and advocating for chronic pain in ways that we can understand and learn from. Together we are stronger.
RE-blogged on fibroflutters.com from BACKPAINBLOGUK in March 2017
171 views since March 2017
How the awards work:
The Chronically Hopeful Award is, in Pamela’s words, “to recognise the incredible people who blog about chronic illness, mental health. ”
Here are the rules:
• Thank your nominator
• Recognize Pamela from There Is Always Hope as the creator of this award with a link.
• Use the Chronically Hopeful Award logo somewhere in your post
• Copy these rules onto your post
• Answer your nominator’s questions
• Write 5-10 of your own questions (they don’t need to be illness related)
• Nominate 5-10 other chronic illness, mental illness, or disability bloggers
• Comment on each of your nominees’ latest posts to tell them they have been nominated
Barbara’s 5 questions are: …
1 How long do you spend blogging and do you blog daily?
This is a toughie for me because it changes all the time depending on what projects and things I’m working on. Blogging daily became too much for me so I blog as and when time and health fit at the same time.
My work regarding sharing news through my social media network is a daily process and has become a main essence of my advocacy. At the same time channelling the balance between ‘all stakeholders’ that are involved within the ‘medical healthcare industries. I can’t expect everyone else to respect all stakeholders and not do it myself. That would be incredibly rude of me…
…To explain to those not familiar with me and FibroFlutters – FibroFlutters have been advocating for a ‘Multi-Disciplinary approach to medical healthcare since we began life a little over 5 years ago, and especially for those of us living with ‘multiple’ chronic health conditions.
Health communications from the life sciences has become a necessary part of helping to educate each other across industries. This side of my work takes up most of my time because I get hundreds of newsletter e-mails to browse through every week that I select from. I’m not complaining because it keeps my brain fed so it’s happy LOL. And I’m learning so much, getting to go to events, meeting new people and experiencing advocacy from outside the computer.
Blogging occurs when I am reporting an event experience such as the speaking at eyeforpharma conferences, or I want to talk about my own health, and they can take anything from an hour to a month to write and compose. The magazines take weeks to edit more than to write.
2 What got you into blogging?
FibroFlutters had been running just under a year and it was clear that we needed a place to store information and to begin with and even more so now was always referred to as our ‘library of resources’ rather a blog.
Our Mission does include a promise to share as much relevant information as possible to the people who need it and setting up a blog was the perfect solution.
It also gave me the personal opportunity to blog within it about my own health journeys, to write and reflect my own experiences with useful articles that I share, advocate for health conditions, campaign for changes to the way we are treated as people, not patients as such, but people.
Advocating for a fibromyalgia charity and learning how to run a group to help support those in my local area. Being able to reach the people who couldn’t leave the house to join us for our monthly meet ups was also a pre-curser to my blog. Making sure that everyone had accessibility to the support they would need. Wordpress provided the avenue to connect with other social media channels which meant it became easier to develop a health communications portal that is now supporting a global following of 5500 people who all hang about on different social media channels.
Multi-channelling is the term for it.
3 What three things do you love about Sunday’s?
It’s my super lazy day that I never plan anything for and I wing it all day
Sunday dinner because it is still the most stable meal of the week and I know that I am ingesting nutrients
Staying in pyjamas all day and never feeling guilty about it
4 Dog or cat?
Cat, called Kuro, but she lives with my ex-husband as she is a daddy’s girl. I still get to see her because I only live 4 doors away and we remained friends when split so I see her when visiting.
She is black and is the cutest of cats by means of personality considering she lived in my wardrobe for the first 2 weeks we had her. Kuro means Black in Japanese and is why we chose it.
5 Heat or cold when you are in pain?
Depends on what pain it is, I am temperature sensitive so spend most of my time keeping the balance between hot and cold.
However, as a treatment cold is good for helping to reduce inflammation which is my nemesis!
SO, I would say cold.
If I catch a chill my whole body feels like it’s being electrocuted, very painful as it fizzes, and I feel so cold and shivery that I must apply my whole body with heat to reduce the pain. Normally it involves many blankets, the central heating, pain pills, hot water bottles and sleep. This is a very painful problem caused by sensitivity issues and one that also triggers ocular migraine and vertigo.
My questions for the people that I am nominating…
1 Thinking about health advocacy, and blogging, how do you engage with other bloggers? which social media channel would you say is your favourite playground… and why??
2 Do blog about an illness that you have yourself, or for someone else, others that cannot do it themselves? What is that illness?
3 What is your main motivation behind the reason why you choose to blog?
4 Are you into Fluffie’s, or Scaly’s?
5 Would you choose a nice cold pint of real Ale, or a glass of wine?
6 BBQ, or tea party?
7 Ball gown, cocktail dress or pants-suit?
My nominees are…
Sheryl Chan | A Chronic Voice | @chronicvoice
Amy | The Myalgia Fibro Warrior Tales >Facing Fibro | myalgiafibrowarrior @myalgiafibrowarrior
Margaret Aranda, MD, PhD | The MD, PhD Is In- “Always at your Service” | @drmargaretaranda
Sam | My Medical Musings | @mossps
Erika | Join The ME Project | @join_tmp
Many thanks for reading and for your support
