Another Healing Story
October of 2025 My body didn’t fall apart all at once. It happened quietly. Gradually. And for a long time, without a name. I talked about it in this blog post from 2020 . About six years ago, I started experiencing pain that didn’t make sense. Deep, grinding joint pain. The kind that makes you wonder if you’re aging at an accelerated rate, or if something fundamental has gone wrong. It wasn’t dramatic inflammation you could see, exactly, although I did gain weight. But mostly, it was felt . Everywhere. Persistently. Eventually, after many false trails and many, many doctors, the diagnosis came: Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) . If you’ve never heard of MCAS, you’re not alone. Many doctors haven’t either—or, if they have, they learned about it in passing. It lives in the gray space between specialties. It doesn’t behave politely. And it doesn’t show up reliably on labs. Mast cells are part of the immune system. Their job is protection. The...
