Reflecting on Jill's triumphs

Episode 2 notes, commentary, and extras

Two years ago, two days after Christmas, I opened my laptop on the floor of a vacant bedroom at my in-laws’ house. My wife Becca was asleep in another room. I held our 10-month-old girl Faith.

It was early that morning that I watched my first POTS “day in the life” video. When it ended I watched a second. Then a third. On screen the faces kept changing, but all I saw was Becca, describing over and over again the cage she had been given to live in.

While getting her first real diagnosis during the 2021 holiday season ended some of the uncertainty that had plagued us for years, it also dampened our already dimming hope of a full recovery.

We learned that there is no cure-all for POTS, a condition that has now crippled Becca’s autonomic nervous system to the point where even placing a pillow under her head spikes her heart rate and makes her faint.

Thankfully, we wouldn’t be navigating it alone. On the other side of the diagnosis we discovered a whole community of “POTSies” waiting for us.

Jill was one who greeted us at the gates.

Becca stumbled on Jill’s POTS-focused podcast early on and spent long couch-bound days working through the catalogue. There she learned about things like IVIG, beta blockers, and, to my horror, fecal microbiota transplantation.

At some point the two connected online and Jill was kind enough to make Becca the star of her very own episode. I was very grateful when nearly a year later Jill agreed to make the jump from interviewer to interviewee in order to share her story with us here.

If you haven’t listened to Jill’s episode yet, here’s the link.

The title track for her story is “Winter” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” - a reference to the important role the cold plays in Jill’s life.

Winter by Vivaldi

After reflecting on Jill’s journey for some time, here are a few takeaways I think will help each of us confront what doesn’t kill us…