heart failure journey – Tate Basildon

How I Outlived Every Cardiac Sarcoidosis Statistic (And Confused My Doctors in the Process)

Living with cardiac sarcoidosis isn’t a five-year countdown—it’s a masterclass in ignoring terrifying survival statistics, baffling specialists, and learning how to live fully in the moment. After twenty years of sarcoidosis, heart failure, and even pulmonary hypertension that mysteriously reversed itself, I’m still here, still cooking, still sarcastic, and still proving that numbers don’t get the final say. sarcoidosis

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Defying the Odds: How I Keep Outliving Every Sarcoidosis Statistic Thrown at Me

Living with sarcoidosis and heart failure means facing down terrifying statistics, clueless predictions, and medical journals that act like they’re auditioning to narrate a true-crime documentary about my lungs. But in the middle of all that doom, I’ve learned to rewrite the script, trust my stubborn body, and keep choosing a life filled with humor, resilience, love, and the occasional hummingbird cameo.

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When A Hospital Check-In Feels Like an Interrogation: A Chef, an MRI, and Too Many Personal Questions

Before my MRI next week, a simple online check-in turned into a bizarre quiz about my private life, sprinkled with the usual sarcoidosis-related precautions—but what came next left me blinking at the screen and wondering who exactly was getting scanned here. Let’s just say the questions took a turn I did not see coming.

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Why I Walked Away From Support Groups (And Found My Voice Instead)

Living with sarcoidosis is already its own exhausting full-time job, so the idea of a support group sounded…promising. Or at least not disastrous. But back in the early 2010s, when my lungs and heart were misbehaving like rebellious teenagers, the search for “people like me” turned into something far stranger than comforting. I won’t spoil the whole story here, but let’s just say it involved Christmas ornaments, long train rides, and me realizing the person I actually needed to find was somewhere else entirely. Maybe someone like you.

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When the Wild Speaks: The Night a Fox and a Crow Changed Everything

On a quiet sunset drive, I stumbled into a raw moment between a fox and a crow—two wild creatures locked in instinct and mystery. What began as an ordinary evening turned into a reflection on survival, intuition, and the strange ways nature mirrors our own chronic-illness battles.