About

The TL;DR of this is:

I became chronically ill in 2017 and love cooking. So, here is my journey back into cooking while chronically ill.

Long Version

My name is Sam Harvey. I’m 29 and I’m trying to come up with something that sounds like something other than I don’t really have a life. But, alas, I come up short. So, in 2017, I was a PhD student at Iowa State University going for rhetoric and professional communication (A complex way of essentially saying “communicate in different ways so you can communicate with different people”). I was cooking several meals every Sunday to last me through the next week and I loved cooking.

In the fall of 2016, I started having short bouts of brain fog. I would try to read one of the 50 articles that were assigned to me to read and I wouldn’t understand a single word of it (Okay, I understood the word, “the,” but that was about it.). I almost didn’t finish my assignments the first semester because the brain fog became so frequent.

March of 2017, I got sick with a cold. I got over the cold, but I started occasionally having severe bouts of fatigue, a physical heaviness that felt like I was wearing a 500 pound suit of armor. I remember one time I was trying to eat pizza and I literally couldn’t lift my arms because they were so heavy. The fatigue and brain fog became more and more common until I had to drop out of the PhD program and move in with my parents in Minnesota.

The fatigue and brain fog got worse, I wasn’t able to cook anymore. When I did try, I would forget to turn off the stove or put in 1/4 cup of cayenne pepper because I forgot that I had already put the required amount in (that’s right, 1/4 cup of cayenne pepper, imagine eating that – that was agony).

Recently, I have found some hacks to cooking so that I can do it again and enjoy it without putting anyone or anything at risk. So join me on this journey as I journey back into cooking while chronically ill .