Empowering Voices: Navigating Compassion, Advocacy, and the Patient Experience

I have POTS and post-viral syndrome myself, so a Washington Post piece on Long COVID and dysautonomia landed differently. Also: a KevinMD story on what one held hand can do.

I have POTS and post-viral syndrome myself, so a few things I read this week landed harder than usual.

The Washington Post covered Long COVID's overlap with POTS: the racing heart on standing, the fainting, the months of being told it's probably anxiety before someone finally checks. That path to diagnosis is exhausting in ways that don't show up in the clinical notes.

On the other side of that exhaustion, a small thing can matter enormously. Dr. Jen Baker wrote on KevinMD about a doctor who simply held a patient's hand during a hard moment. It's not a treatment. It's the difference between being processed and being seen, and patients remember which one they got.

And a reminder that patients belong on conference stages, not just in the audience being discussed. If you're building an agenda and haven't asked a patient to speak, that's worth reconsidering before the program is finalized.

If you want the longer version of what this looks like from the inside, my book *Chronicles of Resilience* is where I put it.