Thank you for listening! Here are the hospital boudoir photos I referred to in the letter: Here’s the info on the Texas Foremothers Galentine’s Day Tour in Austin, TX: Monday, February 13, 8-9am $44.40 Meet at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin Coffee, crystals, and chosen ancestors journal prompts included in the tour price. TICKETS HERE And the full text of my letter to Brandi Carlile (lol, I can’t help but laugh at myself for being a person who wrote a letter to a celebrity) is here: November 30, 2022 To: Brand Carlile Dear Brandi, Before I start this story I want to reassure you that I am okay and the ending is not sad. It is kinda long (sorry), but simply too mystical not to share with you. On June 7, I woke up numb from the waist down. I could walk and function and feel if something was touching me, but if you’ve walked barefoot off the beach while your feet are still covered in wet sand, that was the sensation in my entire lower body. Everything was a bit muffled.  The first time I tried driving after The Numbness, my heart was in my throat. I was terrified my foot wouldn’t be able to properly navigate between the gas and the brake. I had to stop running on the trail near my house because I couldn’t sense changes in terrain very well and nearly tumbled into the creekbed a few times. It took several weeks and a dozen hours on the phone with four doctors’ offices before I finally got a referral for a neurologist and an MRI. A couple hours after my MRI appointment, my neurologist called: “I’m so sorry but you need to go to the emergency room. Today.” When I checked into the Dell Seton ER in Austin on July 14, the attending doctor told me that I’d be receiving three heavy infusions of steroids to calm the inflammation that was causing my numbness and I would likely be spending three nights in the hospital. I got my first infusion at midnight that night and somehow still managed to fall asleep in the midst of ER chaos. Early the next morning they did additional MRIs on my brain and upper spine, and I got relocated from the tiny closet of an ER room I’d slept in the previous night to a big hospital suite on a high floor overlooking Waller Creek and downtown Austin.  As I waited for the hospital neurologist to come in with his entourage and deliver the news of my diagnosis, I sat on the window seat with a brown plastic mug of weak hospital coffee. I looked out at the bright blue sky and cartoon cotton puff clouds drifting above the pink granite dome of the Texas State Capitol. The most beautiful melody floated up to my window from somewhere down below.  I craned my neck and squinted down to see the Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park catty-corner across the street from my hospital room. Some kind of angel was sound-checking for a show that night.  A quick search on my pocket computer let me know you were that angel.  Not long after, the doctor came in and somberly told me the initial MRI showed a waist-level lesion on my spinal cord that was causing my numbness. (At a follow-up appointment they showed me a cross-section of the lesion and I was shocked to see how little margin there was around it. “Wow, it’s almost entirely blocking my spine. I guess it’s kind of miraculous I didn’t completely lose function of everything below the waist…?” I asked. The physician’s assistant opened her eyes so wide and nodded her head so vigorously I was worried she was going to pull something in her neck.)  The MRI on my brain showed several more lesions that had apparently been there a while but hadn’t caused any symptoms I’d noticed. “Probably because I don’t actually use my brain very often,” I joked to the roomful of serious faces in scrubs staring at me. Someone had to lighten the mood.  Because the words “multiple sclerosis” were hanging heavy in the air.  Once the doctors left I gave my husband a tight and tearful hug.  And then I dried my eyes, put on some mascara and red l