Pneumonia? In July??

Annemarie Briskie
4 min readJul 13, 2024
Live look at my new reality.

They say if you don’t make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness. Boy oh boy, they knew what they were talking about. And it can sneak up from behind and you’ll never know what hit ya.

This is a story about how one medical emergency and one minor illness turned into two medical emergencies, two weeks of missed work and lost wages, and complete destruction of the healthy habits I was trying mightily to uphold.

All the focus was on my husband at first — and rightfully so. He awoke in the middle of the night realizing he lost part of his vision in one of his eyes, and when he consulted Dr. Google, he became concerned enough to have me drive him to the emergency room. After an ambulance transfer to a larger (more capable) hospital, it was determined that he had a stroke in one of his retinal arteries. Terrible news for sure, but having worked with patients in the past that have had massive strokes, I knew how much worse it could have been, and thanked our lucky stars that part of his eyesight was the only casualty here. Of course, now all we could think of was making sure this doesn’t happen again, and implementing important lifestyle changes. As I set about doing this, I noticed I had picked up a cough my daughter had earlier in the week. It was bad enough for her to miss a day of work, but she was better in 2 days, so I wasn’t too concerned. I took…

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Annemarie Briskie

cycle breaker. social media junkie. spiritual hippie. rebel soul.