Stand by...

The life of a sepsis and disability advocate during September, Sepsis Awareness Month

Hi everyone! I want to thank all my new subscribers and welcome you to my Substack, which has been “buffering” on pause the last few months after I initially started this platform. I’ve been MIA after a hectic summer, health problems, losing my big brother to neuroendocrine cancer in July, and writing articles on grief in the aftermath. One will appear online soon on The Healthy @Readers Digest. And then rolling directly into September and Sepsis Awareness Month activities. I have yet to catch my breath. I’m tired, sore, irritable, and sleepless, but trust me, it’s all worth it. The passion I have for helping other people avoid suffering my same nearly

life ending crisis when I went into septic shock 4 years ago, is unparalleled and the experience fuels me to get up every morning and keeping doing what I’m doing. Sleep be damned!

So far this month, I’ve been to DC, twice, to advocate on Capitol Hill for sepsis awareness

and to sit in on patient safety meetings with a brilliant group hosted by one of our Sepsis Alliance advisory board members. And then I went off to New York this week to speak at a UN side event.

You can watch the UN conference online. My discussion appears around the 1:23 mark: UNGA80 Parallel Side Event: Sepsis and NCDs A Hidden Link in Global Health.

I hosted booths to educate festival goers and fundraise for the national non-profit, Sepsis Alliance (click here for my fundraiser). One at In the Streets two weeks ago in downtown Frederick, Maryland.

And another booth at the Heritage Days Festival in nearby Middletown just yesterday. For this booth, we launched a 50/50 raffle, the winner will be drawn on October 1st and will receive half of whatever I collect, and Sepsis Alliance will receive the other half. $5 contributed to my Venmo gets one chance at winning, $10 gets 2 chances, $15 gets 3 chances to win, and a $20 dollar donation to my Venmo gets an EXTRA chance = 5 chances to win the drawing this Wednesday. We collected $70 cash yesterday at the booth in Middletown and from my friends at a YMCA dinner the other night. This cash will be added to the pot collected online. For a chance to win, visit my Venmo: @jackieduda2021.

I also have a sepsis, disability, and chronic illness podcast here. And wrote an article for The Lancet medical journal on the critical nature of shining light on Post Sepsis Syndrome.

For the future, I’m designing a website to promote my public speaking on a national level. So far this year I’ve spoken at events and conferences in Washington, DC, Denver, Colorado, New York City, Bethesda, Maryland, and I’ll be heading to Boston to speak at another sepsis event in November. I also just filmed a segment for bone health awareness and the importance of DEXA scans, and appeared on the Broken Not Shattered global podcast.

Thanks for reading everyone. I promise I will get back to posting more essays as soon as I can take a little break and get my creativity stirred up again. You can see all my awareness month activities and disability and chronic illness activism on my Instagram @jackiesjourney4. Follow along for daily updates there. Peace out! Everyone have the best Sunday that you can.