What I did in 2025, mostly from bed

Many of you here signed up for Legal Nomads in its early days, back when it was a blog about my round-the-world adventures. Long before it morphed into a business, and certainly well before my life changed dramatically eight years ago. When I first quit my job to travel, the panic of the not-knowing would occasionally creep in. I went from a lock-step career of legal work, where each year salary was announced and measured, to an accidental entrepreneurship where I genuinely did not know where my path was heading.

But what a ride it was.

For close to a decade, I build my business around what you, my readers, told me you needed or wanted. Initially, the site was just the misadventures of my travels and the wonder of what I was seeing or experiencing. As my readership grew, and I started having reader meetups or doing food tours, you asked me for specific things.

Lawyers asked me how I knew when it was right to quit my job, or how I managed that uncertainty. My alternative careers for lawyers series and resources page was born. Celiac readers asked me to write more about how I found food safely as I traveled. My celiac guides and translation cards then became part of my work. You asked to meet me for soup. I started food tours so I could do so, then country-based artwork in my shop that you could take home after we ate together. You wanted me to share the articles I read somewhere more tangible than social media, so I started my Links I Loved newsletter, which turned into Curious About Everything after my spinal CSF leak began.

There were other projects you asked for, like a course about how to write stories in a digital world, or posts about how I manage my fear of public speaking. These were in progress by the time that I sustained my leak in 2017, but unfortunately I had to put an end to my hopes of creating them as my health simply doesn’t allow it.

As you all well know, my life these days is physically a teeny tiny sliver of the decadent expanse of my travel years. I’m mostly stuck in bed, or at minimum in my apartment —especially in winter, when it’s not safe for me to go outside as I risk losing my meagre ‘uptime’ baseline if I slip. Instead of measuring my days in billable hours, it’s measured in “standing increments”; as soon as I hit my limit, I no longer can stand up.

How to fit all that I want to create, plus feeding myself and taking care of basic needs, into the tick-tock of the clock as it runs down toward my limits?

A fellow leak patient talks about upright time as an hourglass, both because the image evokes not only the panic of passing time but also the fact that it flows downward, much like the pressure exerted on my brain and spine. I’ve adjusted, after these long eight years, to the rigidity of needing to live my life in this way. Ironically, I never wanted to measure my time in those billable units again, yet here I am needing to count the seconds as soon as I stand up.

And yet, one can accomplish so much from bed. Thanks to technology, and to community, though my physical existence is tiny, my life is otherwise infinite. I’ve been able to update you all via social media, participate in projects I care deeply about, and take on a leadership role as a volunteer at the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation.

Living in pain is so exhausting. It’s hard to really quantify the vastness of the weariness, because even trying to do so takes more out of you. And like many things in life, this level of what I often refer to as ‘granularity’, living a teeny life, isn’t something one can comprehend unless you’re smack dab inside of it. Sure, we’re often capable of relative empathy. Yet really thinking of the constriction of that experience, of the constant abacus of measuring uptime seconds, of not being able to tie your own shoes — it’s not something you have to think about until you’re forced to.

For me, 2025 started out in despair.

On Christmas Day last year, I slid in my shower and unspooled my leak baseline to close to nothing. The next months were spent mostly in bed, hoping things would improve. It felt like time moved slowly, and that I couldn’t dig into the projects I wanted to work on.

The past year was one of the hardest I’ve had for reasons above and beyond my leak reopening last December. Both my dad and stepmom were in the hospital (my dad for a significant portion of the year), and helping manage their care plus my role with the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, plus running my own business and dealing with my own significant health issues almost broke me.

Yet looking back on 2025, I somehow managed to do a lot while supine.

Because I publish and share so infrequently, and because this year was so very dense in ways I didn’t think I could handle much longer, I wanted to list out some of the things I’m proud of this year. It’s for me, too, because I rarely stop to think of what I’ve done before moving onto the next task that needs me.

So for both of us, here is what I did from bed this year:

I published my Curious About Everything Newsletter each month

CAE’s first iteration was an email list called “Linkies of the Day”, a compilation of links I read when I was still lawyering. When I quit my job in 2008, I started blogging here on Legal Nomads, and stopped sending out compilations of other reading. I didn’t have as much time to read with a whirlwind of travel each day, and Internet access wasn’t as common. I remember still having my Blackberry for the first year or two of travel, and reading the news to bunkmates in a hostel from it; those days seem quaint compared to the firehose of what we can do from our phones now.

Either way, a few years into my accidental business, I started Links I Loved because readers asked me to compile the interesting pieces I shared via Twitter. I kept that newsletter until I sustained my leak.

A few years into my leak when it became clear my life wasn’t going to ever go back to what it was prior, I had a good cry and really re-thought the way I built my business and what I loved most about the life I managed to create. It was curiosity, among anything, that kept me going, seeking, always in awe. I redesigned Legal Nomads, as you all know, and Links I Loved became Curious About Everything, a newsletter that embodies the thing that’s kept me going all these leaky years later.

CAE #1 went out November 15, 2020. Five years later, I’m at CAE 57, which went out in December. Each month, I compile the best things I read with a “start here” section, as well as a “the best of everything else”. At the bottom, a “quick links” bullet point list of shorter posts that still caught my eye. And it’s been a pleasure to feature one artist each month whose work captured my attention.

Because my Patreon is a paid membership, I’ve kept CAE free. So long as my business continues to earn money via celiac cards and the Patreon, I hope to continue doing so.

It takes a lot of work each month to put this newsletter together, but it is a part of me that has always been front and centre: the voracious need to learn and then send pieces to people I think would enjoy them.

I sold my 25,000th celiac translation card, and offered 3 new languages

My celiac translation cards, which I started after a 2015 trip to Japan when it became clear that a shorter card I used was still getting me sick, are still helping others travel safely even if I’m not able to go any longer. They have been an incredible part of my business to watch evolve.

What began with a pain point for me and a reader who agreed to test a Japanese beta card I created to solve it has turned into 21 languages, and whitelisted cards for travel agents, physicians, and hospitals.

In an era of less respect for intellectual property, it’s also been frustrating to see people buy the card and then sell it themselves after downloading their purchase. Still, the cards help celiacs around the world eat safely and it feels incredible to be able to do so from bed.

This year, I sold my 25,000th card, started offering 3 new languages (Croatian, Korean, and Khmer), and have several cards in the works for 2026.

I published 2 new “essential gluten free guides” this year.

I can only spend a small percentage of uptime on this part of my work, and have collaborated with readers to help me ensure that my guides are accurate and up to date.

This year, I was able to publish my celiac guides to Cambodia, and to South Korea. Each guide is free, around 3000-5000 words and includes what foods are safe and unsafe, restaurants and shops that are suitable for celiacs, and the associated translation card in that country’s language(s). My travel guides were among first on the web to list out the safe/unsafe foods in this way; when I started writing them over a decade ago people generally listed the restaurants and shops, and a phrase or two. For me, the biggest help to feeling anxious as a celiac was to learn the actual foods in the country I was visiting, and know what to flag on menus or at street stalls both for gluten free items and dishes that were definitely going to be unsafe. Likely because a lot of the food I loved to eat was street food, I wasn’t going into places that catered to travellers. This meant I needed to feel and be prepared to understand the food in the place I was visiting.

My gluten free guides series has expanded from that initial template from Japan to 15 countries, including that South Korea guide that was a collaboration with a reader who recently visited the country. There are additional guides (hopefully!) in the works for 2026.

My Patreon became a home for writing that fit in nowhere else

The problem with being curious about everything, is that all your interests don’t fit into a neat niche somewhere that you can market. This never deterred me; I shared what I enjoyed and wrote about what fascinated me over and above what readers asked for.

Over the years, people gave me pointed advice about only focusing on life after law, or on travel as a celiac. They meant well, and wanted my business to grow. But I wanted my business to be me, and while I was told that made me naive (and it may be the case), I am happy that I spent my mobile years doing life on my terms.

The downside to life no longer being on my terms is this finite space from which I can write. Yes, I can use my thumbs from bed on my phone (and do!) but when the pain gets so bad it blots out any creating. I can only lie there in the dark and wait for things to improve.

My Patreon membership is another thing you readers asked for, and for that I’m grateful. The first to do so was Justin, and I will always be thankful for his nudge that it was something I ought to consider. When I set it up, instead of having different tiers with membership deliverables that varied, I created a “Support Only” Patreon, where anyone from each tier had the same access.

This way, I could deliver what my health and pain allowed, and people could support my work in whatever way they wanted. Each tier is a different bird — Bob the bluebird, Fiona the robin, and of course Arthur mascot of Legal Nomads and CAE and curiosity itself, a raven:

So instead of writing more on Legal Nomads, I took to my Patreon for the pieces that fit nowhere else. This year I’ve written about:

• Thundersnow: what it is and why it happens
• A crash course about the Canadian electoral system
• Whether inflammation can cause depression in people with insomnia? (The preliminary answer is yes)
• Why I haven’t gotten more treatment for my spinal CSF leak
• All about anteaters (part of a series about different animals I love, the prior being shoebills) — this is a public post, so I linked to it

Each month I also share overflow links that didn’t make it into CAE because I ran out of room, as well as short life updates and photos.

Thank you to those who were or are in the Patreon! I maintain a list of members here, though there are a few names I still need to add who recently signed up. I’ve mentioned prior that I am not eligible for disability in Canada (I know). The consistent income from my Patreon allows me to focus a lot of my time on my volunteer work, which benefits a wide community of spinal CSF leak patients. We all appreciate your support.

If you’re interested in becoming a member, I’m offering 15% off until January 5th for all annual sign ups. Just use code 2025YEAREND.

I was a co-author in my first research paper

This year, I collaborated with a group of physicians to participate as a patient author in a paper proposing a new standardized reporting measure for dynamic myelography. A myelogram is a diagnostic imaging test that is used in spinal CSF leak, involving a contrast dye injected intrathecally (inside the dura), to get detailed output that helps locate a leak or dural defect.

Dynamic myelography, and specifically dynamic CT Myelography, is a version of myelography that involves changing patient positioning and scanning in real-time to visualize the contrast as it ‘escapes’, allowing physicians to locate certain types of leaks that may not be visible without the dynamic component.

Our paper’s proposed system, called SIH-RADS, helped improve understanding of the condition for patients, and physicians also said they preferred it to traditional reporting options. The paper’s title is a mouthful: “Enhancing Clarity in Dynamic Myelography Reporting: Results of a Survey of Patients and Referring Providers Evaluating a Standardized Reporting System in the Myelographic Work-Up of Patients with Suspected Spontaneous Intracranial Hypotension“. A summary created by the journal is below:

I was voted in as Board President of the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, and ran my first hiring process

I initially started volunteering at the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation in 2021, and somehow by 2025 I was invited to step up as official Board President. To say this was never in my plans is an understatement; I got involved to try and support patients in more official ways than my writing. I stayed to keep contributing to research and progress in the field as much as I could. And I ended up being in the President role unexpectedly (that is a theme in my life, I know…)

A good chunk of of my waking hours were dedicated to the Foundation this year, including the need to hire a new executive director. It was my first rodeo planning a hiring process, and it was both interesting and very stressful. We received over 130 applications total, far more than expected. Creating questions, coordinating and attending the interview process with board members, creating a scoring process, and then looking into the legal aspects of hiring with the help of pro bono employment counsel I brought on (thank you Jess!) was a lot.

In addition to hiring, there was planning the annual conference in the field, working on launching the first international patient registry for spinal CSF leak, planning our awareness week called leakweek, running Board meetings, and keeping the org running with the help of the Board until the hiring process was complete and I could fully onboard our new ED.

It’s volunteer work, and people often ask why I’m doing so much if it’s for free. My answer is twofold, one I’m very fortunate that while my business definitely needs more tending to — it still can run with little input from me day to day. And secondly, that given how many pots I had my hands in unexpectedly on the org side, I was worried that if I left projects I cared about would sputter. I couldn’t imagine what that would be like for the wider community of leak patients.

It’s been a profoundly humbling experience to be in a leadership role and help move research and policy forward. I never imagined going to law school that I would be involved in a medical research paper, nor help run a 501(c)(3) about a condition I’d never heard of.

While exhausting, this year was also a surprising gift. I’ve said I felt like I had 3 lives so far: a lawyer life, a travelling life, and an advocate and creator life. Being in this leadership role forced me to integrate my disparate “lives” in ways I never expected. I used my ‘legal brain’, I used skills I picked and honed up running my business, and I continued to help advocate alongside a great Board of Directors. The net of it all is the first time since I started leaking that I believe I can still find my way in the world cognitively, even though I have a debilitating neurological condition.

I do need to get back to my own business, and I’m hoping as the year goes on I will slowly be able to shift some of the de facto ED work to our new (lovely!) executive director, and stay in the Board President role.

I spoke at a conference about barriers to care in spinal CSF leak

And did so standing up!

This talk made me very nervous because I felt the pressure of representing the spinal CSF leak community as best I could, while also communicating in a way that (hopefully) made physicians willing to listen.

It was an unusual talk because it was structured as a ‘fireside chat’, an open conversation between me and Dr. Andrew Callen, a neuroradiologist from from University of Colorado. We tackled different topics in the field from the perspective of patients vs. physicians, and had an open and raw discussion about the aspects that are tough for each category.

Feedback was positive, and I’m honoured that he asked me to participate in this year’s conference. I was the only patient speaker, but we did have patient moderators who did a fantastic job of guiding questions following prior physician-only talks.

I updated some older posts with new data or retrospectives, and published one post

• I updated my post about my Vipassana meditation experience in New Zealand with a newer section that looks back on this 10-day silent meditation course ten years later.
• I updated my jet lag tips post with new studies about sleep and changes to the apps I recommended previously
• I updated my mast cell activation syndrome page with new dietary shifts I’ve undertaken, and a lot of new studies about thyroid conditions and mast cells, long covid and MCAS, and more. Years ago, I wrote about traveling with anxiety and insomnia, two components of what felt like inexorable darkness that followed me everywhere. Both the anxiety and the insomnia, it turns out, were a byproduct of a dysfunctional immune system. An immune system that became even more dysfunctional once I got dengue fever from a mosquito in Vietnam, and then went into overdrive when I sustained my leak. With the comfort of that understanding, and more regular sleep than ever before, I decided to build the resources I wish I had when desperately trying to figure out what was wrong. The difference, this time, was I had to do so in 20 minute increments instead of the hours of deep work I used to enjoy, but these 20,000 words hopefully will help others with the condition.
• I updated my celiac’s guide to Ottawa post with some new restaurants I tried this year. This post will be a living tree as I continue to eat my way around the city I now call home.
• I updated my resources page for lawyers who want to leave the law. Readers tell me it’s useful for any career change, and the process certainly served me well many a time in my life.
• I published a piece about the myth of telling chronically ill patients to “just fight harder”, and it includes a compilation of quotes from others with complex cases like mine.

While I wish I had more bandwidth to write new posts, I do try and keep those articles with research background current as new data emerge. And those that are crucial to my life path, like the Vipassana retreat was for me, deserved a few extra words 10 years later.

I recorded an episode with The Hearing, a Thomson Reuters podcast

The Hearing is a legal podcast by Thomson Reuters that launched in 2018, and explores the people, ideas, and issues in today’s legal world. With hosts based in both the US and the UK, the show brings a global perspective to conversations across legal and public policy landscapes. The producers reached out via my contact form to ask if I’d be interested in participating in a podcast episode about my advice to lawyers who want to change careers, as well as the trajectory of my own work life.

It’s 53 minutes long, and I had fun with the host — she asked great questions, and was easy to chat and share with. I used to participate in podcast interviews often, but less so since my leak began. I hope you find it interesting!

You can listen on Apple Podcasts here, or on Spotify here.

We raised $4,217 USD for spinal CSF leak as a community!

This past June, you all helped me hit the top of the leaderboard for leakweek, the annual awareness week for spinal CSF leak. Thank you for all your contributions and donations, and your support!

It’s been on chaotic and dense year, but looking back on all of the above I feel grateful for this fantastic community and the elements of my business that have allowed me to learn so much about my condition in the hopes of helping others.

Wishing each and every one of you all the best for the year ahead,