I met craftyGAgal on Twitter and learned about how she succeeds in business through chronic pain. We connected on Facebook too. The more I’ve learned about her and her drive to make and sell crafts and to blog, the more I wanted to share her positive attitude and her beautiful work with my readers.

craftyGAgal’s real name is Meredith Crosby. She is 31 years old, married and has twin boys who are 7 years old. When she was a young girl, she was involved in a boating accident and injured her back. Her condition worsened after her pregnancy due to carrying twins and the weight gain that went along with it. She also has scoliosis and has had to endure a spinal fusion and a costoplasty- where they removed several centimeters of five of her ribs to remove a hump that was in her back due to the scoliosis. The ribs are then left broken to heal back together. She had two titanium rods put into my back, 13 screws and lots of other hardware. These were both very painful operations.

Meredith describes her condition as, “Constant never ending Pain, numbness in limbs and sometimes lips, unable to do anything for long periods of time, depression, anxiety, loss of social life…” But she has a loving and supportive husband and her children love her unconditionally. She is part of the Invisible Illness group because she doesn’t look disabled and has friends and even some family members who don’t understand her situation and her chronic pain.

After being told that she could not work, she began crafting for fun and to keep her mind busy and occupied. She makes stained glass, beaded and gemstone jewelry and crochets baby items and hats. She has a store on Etsy - craftyGAgal, where she takes custom orders and lists new items every day.

*Important* If you shop at her Etsy store between now and the end of the day on July 6th, put in a code “MyChronicLife” to the “Note to Seller” area you will get a 10% discount.

Get to know her and her bubbly personality on Twitter and on Facebook, where she’s also known as Southern Handmade Gifts. She’ll have you laughing, I promise! And if you think that isn’t enough, visit her blog, craftyGAgal’s Southern Handmade Gifts.

This is an ongoing effort to spotlight people with chronic illness, health issues and disabilities who are making a contribution in some way despite their pain, sickness, etc.

Have you ever been refused primary medical care if you have are chronically ill? If so, do you have one chronic illness or multiple ones? I’m trying to get a handle on this issue because it seems to be a trend that I’m learning about. It has also happened to me.

I’ve either been turned down by doctors’ offices on the phone before my first appointment when I explain that I have multiple chronic illnesses, been told that I can longer remain a patient because my care is too complicated or have had to “fire” doctors who refuse to maintain the tests and/or relationships with the many specialists that I must see.

You may be wondering why I divulge my health information on an initial phone call to a doctor. I’ve learned to do that because I don’t want to make an appointment, drive there, fill out forms and then be told that I’m not wanted. It saves me time and energy.

I’d like to hear what your history has been with this situation please. This can be the first step in promoting our issue and trying to get a solution for it.

I try my best to be positive, but there are some days when I can’t help but be disappointed with living with chronic illnesses. Today is one of those days. We arrived for our first day at Disney World. I knew that it was going to be hot of course and planned accordingly.

Instead of visiting the parks during the heat of the day because it affects the Myasthenia Gravis, I planned on keeping busy indoors and going to the parks after the sun goes down. Today we did just that, well almost. I stayed in the resort during the day, looking around and of course checking out the shopping. We ate lunch here too. I got to take a nap in the late afternoon and we planned on going to Epcot about 7 PM.

Unfortunately the minute we got outside the heat hit me and I felt terribly weak. So weak in fact that I couldn’t even use my scooter. Not good for me or for my husband and daughter. I have been going through some serious issues with the MG lately so I guess this was to be expected.

We were able to take our van to go out to eat instead. Torrow is another day and I’m using my positive attitude to think that I will feel better. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep and be sure to take my meds on time, eat right and not stress.

I’ll keep you posted on how things go. The one great thing about Disney is that even if I don’t get to the Parks, there’s so much that I can do indoors to have fun.

Choosing a doctor to perform your Lasik Surgery can be difficult. You want to be sure that the doctor has performed many surgeries and has done them successfully. If you are able to read testimonials from patients that is helpful. Checking on the doctor’s credentials from your state’s medical board is another way to feel confident.

If you can get information on the procedure by seeing seeing one done live that can help prepare you. I’m a person that wants to know everything in advance. Other people don’t want to and would rather have the procedure done without much information in advance.

Salt Lake City Lasik Surgery has a video of a procedure for anyone to see:

Many people don’t know what it is like to live with Myasthenia Gravis because it is a rare disease. I’d like to shed some light into my life.

Since Myasthenia Gravis affects my muscles, I am often weak. Most often my symptoms begin with my eyes. Almost all of the time, my right eyelid droops. To people who don’t know me it may not be noticeable, but it is to me and my family and friends. It becomes noticeable if my symptoms worsen and there’s nothing that I can do about it. I then begin to feel like my forehead is drooping. You can’t see that, but it’s a pretty awful feeling. My speech can get slurred and I sound like I’m drunk. My head feels heavy, too heavy for my neck to hold it up.

If I get worse, my arms and legs then begin to feel very heavy. I often feel that I can’t move, especially walk. This doesn’t scare me any more, but it annoys me. I get very frustrated because I feel like I’m stuck in one place. I do have a scooter to use so if I feel strong enough, I can use it.

The worst symptoms for me is feeling like my throat is closing up. When I am extremely weak, this happens suddenly. This scares me a lot. It makes me feel like I’m choking. This will also happen for no reason in the middle of the night. I have to either get up myself or if I’m too weak, have my husband get some food (if I can swallow it) and my Mestinon. I also have trouble swallowing food sometimes and issues with breathing, especially when I move around a lot.

When I have a flare up, these symptoms are more constant, but on normal days, they do not happen very often. Being in the heat, getting stressed, being around chemical odors (even cleaning supplies) and just doing too much physically can set the symptoms off.

Life with Myasthenia Gravis, is not too bad because I know that most of the time my medication can control my symptoms. It may take some time for it to work, but it does work. If I need to have my medication dose changed, I can call my neurologist or go see him.

I haven’t been to the ER because of MG symptoms, also called a crisis, in years. I am grateful for what I am able to do and how my life is going right now.

Imagine having an eBook library at your fingertips. One that you can search by topic or title. I was able to find information on health topics, something that I normally research online. I put in the topics chronic illness, myasthenia gravis and sjogren’s syndrome. Not only did a large amount of eBooks come up, but also more specific topics in these categories. For example, with sjogren’s syndrome, I found “sjogren’s syndrome symptoms” that was clickable.

The eBooks are in pdf, word, rtf and ppt files, but can be accessed in html form. I was able to easily Search for any eBook because this database is huge. I was extremely pleased with the information I found.