Category: Health

Claustrophobia

by pennypostcard • December 8, 2025 • 1 Comment

My accident—the day I was hit by a truck and my life took a hard right turn—was just over three weeks ago. It feels like a lifetime has passed, yet it’s also difficult to believe I’ve already lost so much time. During a one-year tour, each week makes up 1.9% of the assignment. By that math, I’ve already lost 5.8% of my time in Burma (along with post allowances like danger and hardship pay), and the count keeps climbing because of this accident.

Over the 20 days I’ve now spent hospitalized in Thailand, the overall ordeal has felt a bit like Groundhog Day, even as the details of my daily lived experience have shifted subtly over time.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health, Travel

The Land of Smiles

by pennypostcard • December 4, 2025 • 0 Comments

Taking an international flight in a wheelchair is something I never imagined I’d experience. Yet when I arrived in Bangkok a little over two weeks ago, that’s exactly how I traveled—having not taken a single step except for the small ones over the seam between the breezeway and the plane, the only gap the wheelchair couldn’t bridge.

The morning three days after my truck vs. pedestrian accident, motorpool drove me from our house to the airport. An embassy nurse and my husband accompanied. I was pushed in a wheelchair through check-in, immigration, security, and Rangoon’s mostly-empty international departures terminal. I was the second passenger to board the flight, transferred into the tiny, narrow wheelchair that fits down the plane aisle. I settled into a comfortable business-class seat and never got up during the 70-minute flight. When we landed in Bangkok, an ambulance—and finally, answers about my injuries—waited just beyond baggage claim.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Aftermath

by pennypostcard • November 29, 2025 • 5 Comments

Coming home from the embassy that Sunday morning after my accident ushered in not only new levels of physical pain, but a lingering stretch of complicated, disorienting emotional terrain.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Butterfly Effect

by pennypostcard • November 28, 2025 • 1 Comment

The night I was hit by a truck earlier this month while crossing the street is blurry in places, with some parts missing entirely. I think of the first 48 hours afterward in two distinct phases: the initial hours of confusion, memory loss, and non-linearity; and the remainder marked by pain, overwhelm, regret, and the slow, devastating realization of what had happened.

The day and night of the accident had been completely ordinary. Ordinary, until a second before impact, when I turned my head expecting only traffic coming from the right and instead saw the truck barreling toward me from the left, traveling on the wrong side of the road. Everything after that is blank for maybe half an hour, followed by other gaps and hazy fragments during the three or four hours I spent in the hospital.

Burma, Foreign Service, Health

Wrong Lane

by pennypostcard • November 24, 2025 • 5 Comments

After more than six weeks of the longest government shutdown in history, things were finally starting to brighten up towards mid-November. After a sudden medevac to Bangkok, my husband V had successful gallbladder removal surgery and returned home to Rangoon. The U.S. government reopened and federal employees received our three missing paychecks in quick succession. The bid season relaunched, sparking renewed excitement about our potential next tour. V and I spent a day off together in observance of a Burmese holiday—swimming in our favorite local pool, then enjoying a quiet evening at home relaxing with our cat. All seemed to be getting back to normal.

Then, the following Saturday night, we had one of the worst nights of our lives—sudden, unexpected, and completely out of the blue. It was the kind of night that shifts your reality, stripping away any illusion that you are in control and leaving you in a world so different from the one you knew just moments before that the surreality comes in continual waves of disbelief.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Distance Vision, Part III

by pennypostcard • October 18, 2024 • 1 Comment

In early January, I had eye surgery to free myself from glasses and contact lenses. The procedure was called refractive lens exchange, or custom lens replacement (CLR, pronounced like the word “clear”). During CLR, an ophthalmologist removes the natural lens from behind each eye and replaces them with synthetic interocular lenses (IOLs). In my case, like cataract surgery without the cataracts.

IOLs can never develop cataracts and are free of the age-related hardening and clouding that begins in your 40s. This lens hardening causes presbyopia, which means you may need reading glasses, even if you’ve had LASIK in the past to correct astigmatism. CLR restores the eye’s original refractive ability by dealing with all of your vision problems on the back end. Usually, CLR patients no longer need any vision correction.

Although my first CLR corrected most of my astigmatism, it took three further surgeries to bring my vision up to its present point: clear at all distances. I would have been dumbfounded to know back at the beginning that it would ultimately take four procedures to permanently correct my vision. But fortunately it was all covered by the initial price I’d paid and today I have no regrets.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers

by pennypostcard • April 30, 2024 • 2 Comments

Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.

Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.

But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Distance Vision, Part II

by pennypostcard • April 3, 2024 • 2 Comments

In January, I wrote about having eye surgery during the first week of the new year to free myself from glasses and contact lenses. The procedure was called refractive lens exchange, or custom lens replacement (CLR, pronounced like the word “clear”).

In CLR, an ophthalmologist removes the natural lens behind the eye and replaces it with a synthetic interocular lens (IOL). The synthetic lens can never develop cataracts and is free of the age-related hardening and opacity a natural lens eventually experiences. CLR restores the eye’s original refractive ability. Therefore, depending on the kind of IOLs inserted – the patient no longer needs vision correction as a result.

Although CLR corrected my astigmatism as promised, it took a second procedure, LASIK, in mid-February to fine-tune the results and try to bring my close-up vision into focus.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Distance Vision

by pennypostcard • January 31, 2024 • 5 Comments

A couple of days into the new year, I had eye surgery in northern Virginia to permanently lessen my dependence on glasses and contacts.

Refractive lens exchange – – sometimes called custom lens replacement, clear lens replacement, or CLR (pronounced like “clear”) – – is an outpatient surgery that replaces the natural lens of your eye with an artificial interocular lens. Patients undergo in-depth testing and receive lenses tailored to their individual needs. The procedure stabilizes your vision, prevents you from developing cataracts in the future, and is supposed to correct for near-sightedness, far-sightedness, astigmatism, and reading prescriptions.

The jury’s still out on my up-close vision as my eyes heal and the swelling reduces, but so far my view to the horizon has been sharper than ever.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Gone From My Sight, Part II

by pennypostcard • November 30, 2023 • 6 Comments

[This is a companion piece to a post I wrote in August 2023.]

The second week of October, I arrived in Washington state to help my dad take care of my stepmom L in what I now know was her final six weeks of hospice. She was battling pancreatic cancer – one of the scariest and most intimidating illnesses imaginable.

I don’t think of her as having lost a battle with cancer, but sadly, she did die in mid-November. In the weeks leading up to her death, I was forced to confront my own previous assumptions about the home as proxy for a ‘good’ death and my shock about how much of hospice care in the United States falls directly to a patient’s family.

Health, U.S.

Gone From My Sight

by pennypostcard • August 22, 2023 • 1 Comment

In July I wrote about the cross-country road trip I had just taken with my husband V from Virginia to Washington state. The purpose of our trip was to visit my dad and stepmom, so for the first time I went to the west coast without making it down to California.

My stepmom was diagnosed with a serious illness early last summer. Since then, I’d visited her and my dad five other times. But V had not seen either of them since they came to visit us in Mexico in October 2021, several months before my stepmom’s diagnosis. As she entered hospice in June of this year, it became more important V and I visit together. My brother C and my stepbrother J and his family came too; my stepbrother B had visited the week before. And she was very happy to have us all under one roof. For me, it was reason #528 a domestic tour is a great place to be right now vs. serving overseas.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2022 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • April 12, 2023 • 1 Comment

For me, 2022 was a profoundly strange year, filled with ups and downs. We finalized adopting our cat and moved from Mexico to Virginia, I succeeded in my 100-lb weight loss goal, took a road trip to Florida, started my fourth tour in Washington, DC, and visited the west coast three times in one year. I got promoted, saw my favorite band live, took fun beach trips with my husband, and took a family trip to Europe. But I also was knocked off-center by the traumatic death of an old friend, struggled at times to learn my new job, and dealt with illness – both my own and that of multiple family members.

Health, U.S.

Mental Health is Health

by pennypostcard • February 28, 2023 • 4 Comments

I’m continuing to catch up with blog posts from a few months ago to bring us to the present day. September 2022 marked one year since the death of my longtime friend T who I met in 1998 and who was my boyfriend off and on for a few years while I was in college. It hardly seemed possible a year had elapsed, since I’d only learned in April that he’d already been gone for seven months. It still felt new and unfathomable to me. In an attempt to find answers and process his passing, I’d gone to California in May and visited his grave, worked on a memorial plaque, and found lots of books and podcasts about suicide and grief.

In honor of T’s life and September being National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, I tried some volunteer activities I’d hoped would help me feel like I was doing something that mattered. I couldn’t help the one person I really wanted to try and help, so maybe I could help someone else. But I slowly began to understand I couldn’t “action” away my grief with memorial or suicide prevention activities, nor did “grief brain” allow me the ability to take on a lot of new information or tasks. As time passed and my shock wore off, I actually felt worse as people were expecting me to start feeling better. I saw I needed to take a step back to process. Because grief is an individual journey and everything you feel when grieving is normal and OK, even if it doesn’t meet others’ expectations or even your own.

Foreign Service, Health, U.S.

Blurry Summer

by pennypostcard • December 20, 2022 • 4 Comments

I am months behind in my blogging. We are somehow now less than two weeks from the end of 2022 and yet – writing life-posts chronologically as I prefer to do – I’ve most recently only written about my May/June road trip to the west coast.

As I have dealt with personal and family illness, workplace disappointments from Juárez, the January curtailment halfway through my Mexico tour, and confusion from the suicide of an old friend for most of this year, this blog has not been the platform to write about some of the darker grief on my mind. I’ve had good blog posts in draft for months, on topics from our late summer trip to the Balkans, to getting promoted in the Foreign Service, to a follow-up to my wildly popular post about Foreign Service housing, all in various stages from partly-done to mere sketchy outlines.

Health, U.S.

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month: What Everyone Should Know

by pennypostcard • September 11, 2022 • 4 Comments

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month in the United States, and September 4-10, 2022 marked National Suicide Prevention Week, an annual campaign to educate the public and promote increased awareness about suicide. On a personal note, one year ago this month an old friend and someone important to me took his own life, so I’d like to use this post to discuss suicide awareness. Suicide is a heavily stigmatized topic many people avoid and consider taboo. But it’s not a contagious disease. It touches so many of us and is getting harder to ignore.

In fact, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), in the United States in 2020, there were almost 46,000 reported suicide deaths; a shocking 53% of them were firearm suicides. During the same time period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports an estimated 12.2 million American adults contemplated suicide, 3.2 million made a plan, and 1.2 million Americans attempted suicide. (The true figure could be much higher, since some suicide attempts go unreported.)

Stop for a moment and consider the human toll beyond the statistics. How many friends, family members, classmates or coworkers are connected to each of those individuals? The AFSP estimates a staggering 53% to 85% of Americans have been affected in some way by suicide – whether it’s trauma from witnessing a stranger’s suicide, coping with losing a loved one, or suffering with suicidal thoughts themselves. You may know someone like this, or this may be you. So if you’re wondering whether you can do anything to help, the answer is yes. And I’m asking you to try. Suicide prevention is officially everyone’s business.

Page 1 of 2

1 2 »

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: