HeyJaredZebras Underground
Zebra Underground is a sassy dispatch for the chronically curious. We dig into EDS, POTS, MCAS & more with real insights, lived truth, and bold questions. No sugarcoating—just raw and sometimes witty answers. This is where rare meets real.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 19
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 11, 2026
Latest issues
Final Catch-22: Irony of Certainty vs. Questions In Chronic Illness (opens the original)
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Deep Dive with Questions to Ask Yourself Before Health-Related Decision-MakingIf you’re anything like me, spending years learning how to advocate for my complicated body. Now I am wondering whether the next skill is knowing when to stop chasing medical certainty.There is a strange moment in complex chronic illness that we don’t talk about nearly enough.You spend years trying to find the right doctor.You research. You wait. You send records. You learn terminology you never particularly wanted to
Chronic Catch-22: Advocate for Yourself, But Don’t Be THAT Patient (opens the original)
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By the time you have lived with complex chronic illness for a while, you may have accidentally acquired a second education.Nobody hands you a diploma. There is no graduation ceremony. Sallie Mae does not come looking for you, which may be the only upside.But somehow you learn anatomy. You learn medication names, insurance codes, abbreviations and which specialist owns which approximately three-square-inch section of your body. You learn that “unremarkable” is generally good news even though it s
Chronic Catch-22: I Need a Surgeon, But I Don’t Really WANT Surgery (opens the original)
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There is a moment in complex chronic illness that nobody really prepares you for.You finally get what you wanted.The expert.Not just another doctor who has vaguely heard of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Not somebody who once attended a lunch-and-learn on hypermobility.The expert expert.The person patients talk about in Facebook groups using only their last name because apparently once you’ve reached this level of medicine, first names are no longer necessary.You send records.You fill out forms.You col
Catch 22: Becoming an Expert in Your Illness, But Forget Who You Are (opens the original)
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I’m writing this just after returning from a week-long Love Your Brain retreat in the Colorado mountains for people affected by traumatic brain injury.Yes, there is some irony here.I realize I just wrote an entire article about not letting diagnoses become your identity, and then voluntarily spent a week at a retreat organized around one of mine.But maybe that is exactly the point.I went because of something that happened to my brain.What I found were people.Beautiful, funny, complicated, resili
Chronic Catch-22: Keep Searching, But Stop Chasing (opens the original)
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If you have lived with complex chronic illness long enough, you may have learned one of the most important lessons of patient advocacy:Keep looking.The first doctor may not know.The second might tell you it’s stress.The third orders the wrong test.The fourth says your labs are normal.The fifth sends you back to the first.Eventually, somebody listens differently, orders something differently, or knows something the others didn’t.And sometimes you discover:You were right.Som
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