I spent my birthday in the ER...because of cheese curds.

Living in a chronic ill body is so weird some times. What can you do but laugh?

It’s Called Healing is a new email newsletter from Cassie Johnston focused on living an authentic healing life with chronic illness. If you are a current Wholefully subscriber, you’ve been automatically subscribed to It’s Called Healing, but you can unsubscribe anytime you like if it doesn’t feel like a good fit.

Shoutout to the amazing staff at Aurora Medical Center Sheboygan who really epitomized “Midwest Nice” and made a scary day easier for a gal far from home.

Chronic illness has made birthdays so much more special to me. Now that I have a body that likes to betray me on the regular, making it through another year on this planet seems worthy of a bigger and bigger celebration each year. Give me streamers, give me candles, give me banners, give me party hats, give me friends and family singing to me over a pile of gluten-free brownies.

As a person in her mid-forties, I should probably feel ashamed that I celebrate my birthdays like an 8-year-old, but honestly, screw it. Making it through another year for anyone is a win worth celebrating, but especially when your body is in constant pain.

So that explains why I was super giddy this year when I found out my birthday fell on the same weekend when a huge group of my friends gather each summer for an IndyCar race in Wisconsin. We camp together. We eat good food. We laugh. We watch race cars. We decorate golf carts and then drive them around in totally responsible and not at all dangerous ways. It’s one of my favorite weekends of the year, and this year, it was on my birthday! Kismet, right? It was going to be the best weekend of my life.

Spoiler alert: it super wasn’t.