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ChronicBabe Blog Carnival #1: I can bring home the bacon! Thoughts on work and chronic illness

Welcome to the first-ever ChronicBabe Blog Carnival! We're excited to bring you 20 awesomely babelicious perspectives on work and chronic illness. We worked hard with co-organizer Fibrochondriac
to create a real diversity of writing. Without further ado...

Practical work/life tips to start using today

Amy Tenderich at DiabetesMine brings us Hey Coach, So What If I'm Sick?, offering us nuggets of interest via a profile of Rosalind Joffe, a chronic illness coach.

Got a question about working with chronic illness? Jennifer Jaff, executive director of Advocacy for Patients with Chronic Illness, is the babe for you. She has helped thousands of people with chronic illness interface with the rest of the world. She manages to balance crazy-busy 15-hour workdays with Crohn's disease and gastroparesis. She can help you find answers to your questions on how to keep working with a chronic illness every day. Just ask!

(For the past year, Jennifer has been intensely focused on health care reform and has been the source of clear and honest information on it on her blog. She sums it up at Health Reform End Game.)

Hayzell at Possibilism is a tech-savvy babe who provides tips on reducing pain in the workplace. Feel Less Pain While Using Your Computer: Get a Virtual Ergonomic Coach has tips from her on making your workspace work better for YOU.

Hayzell also shares a video on Google Goggles, a visual search engine for Android cell phones. Imagine: Instead of typing in a search, take a picture of the item instead. Google Goggles can help people with repetitive strain injuries from too much keyboarding on the job.

Employed...in a balancing act

Erica is learning to balance work, home life, and new-found passion for hula hooping. She talks about the ups and downs of her life as a mom, career girl, and lover of fun at ChronicBabe.

i've got a headache Becky Thompson at Instructions Not Included asks: What is work? What is a disability? Does one preclude the other? Work is where she feels safe, and not working makes her feel useless. Becky describes a day in her dramatic life pre-chronic illness. While she misses that life, she realizes that re-evaluating doesn’t mean she can’t do anything; she’ll just have to try something different, in Reevaluating the Goal Posts.

At her blog This Year's Masterpiece, Nessie tells us she works two jobs because she has to, and there are a lot of downsides to working and Bringing Home the Bacon...but it is crucial to her emotional well-being to work.

After "resetting her system," the author struggles to find a balance between life, work and pain in Thoughts About Balance When You Have Chronic Pain at How to Cope with Pain.

Elisabeth at Redefining "Good" talks about Illness and Employment. As someone who relies on work for her health coverage, her ability to work is paramount. Of course, her illness is slowly impacting her quality of work more and more, and she needs to balance her need to work and her need to manage her health. Sound familiar?

KD at Making Noises talks about Working and Chronic Illness: A Delicate Balance. She details a bit of her journey of "working" toward acceptance of limitations surrounding work, and placing higher priorities on management of her illness.

Employed...and dealing with it

happy at work Laurie Edwards at A Chronic Dose realizes it’s time to make some decisions and climb back out of the hole in Down the Rabbit Hole: When Chronic Illness and Work Conflict. Finding balance between work and illness is a lot easier when your illness is stable. Throw a prolonged infection and hospitalization into the mix with several jobs, and the result is a personal free-fall.

Wendy Burnett at Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired says sometimes, working isn’t about self-actualization; it’s about the paycheck and making enough money to put food on the table. In Working with Chronic Illness: Mixed Blessings she explains that sometimes the stressors weigh more than the paycheck.

Rachel at Tales of my Thirties wonders if she really needs this job and what will win out, her health or her employer, in The Proposal.

Hannah McD at Dorkabetic has found a new way to present her resume information in The [Non-] Functional [Pancreas] Resume. Hannah is focusing her career on her creativeness, and wonders if her blogging and social networking skills should be included. That would mean disclosing her chronic illness.

Living with unemployment

Selena at Oh My Aches and Pains!What If I Could Go Back to Work? What would it take for her to go back to work in her current condition? She's not entirely sure, but she has some thoughts on the subject. ponders the thought:

Adriana at Living Life with Diabetes is unemployed and looking for work. She realizes that she can't explain her resume unless she explains her chronic illness, because her work has always been about diabetes. She discusses dealing with job interviews in Diabetes in the Workplace.

Diana Lee at Somebody Heal Me: The Musings of a Chronic Migraineur is an attorney who can no longer work. When she thinks about the future, she looks forward to helping people, but worries about rusty skills in Looking Ahead: Musings About Work and Career. She says: "Rather than focusing on what I've lost in my career due to the limits of my chronic illnesses, I'm trying to learn to focus on what I'm still able to do and the people I've been able to help despite my limitations. This is a new perspective for me, but well worth pursuing." We can relate, Babe!

Migrainista talks about Working With My Chronic Pain. She misses being independent and being able to contribute through work, and wonders if she'll ever be able to work again. She talks about the struggles she's having surrounding my inability to work as a result of my chronic pain.

working from bed Annie Martin at It's Time To Get Over How Fragile You Are Chronic Illness and Work, she struggles with being chronically ill and unable to support herself. She relies on the compassion and care of others. She sets goals for herself with the hope that one day she can support herself. Sounds familiar.
is very clear: I am sick, not lazy. In

Unemployed? Back to school!

Assiya is Worried about Work at For a Fairer Today. Why would an employer hire her? She smart, passionate…and chronically ill. As a university student with chronic health problems Assiya worries about what her health will mean for her future and employment.

At Diary of a Forgetful Girl, the Forgetful Girl herself longs for the routine world of work instead of the unpredictable life of the chronically ill in Wish I Could Work 9-5. She's working on her degree and looking hopefully toward a future.

Like what you see here? Why not enter the next ChronicBabe Blog Carnival!

This is our first big go at running a blog carnival. Let us know what you think in the discussion over at the Forum.

Want to participate in the next carnival? It's two weeks from today, and the theme is Love, Illness and Other Confusing Things. We would love to hear your thoughts on the topic! If you want to participate, send us your name (as you would like it to appear), the name of your blog, the name of your post, and a 1-2 sentence description of the post. We'll let you know if you're accepted. Send all that to chronic babe @ gmail dot com.

Thanks again to all the participants, and to our pals at Fibrochondriac for helping make this blog carnival a reality!

Posted: 4/6/2010 in Blog Carnival

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