I'm sending huge thanks to the staff and volunteers at the Addison's Disease Self-Help Group charity.
Not only have they given me a platform to promote White Spirit, but they've also done wonders in sharing the news about my novel through many outlets including their own website and newsletters, and social media. Thank you!
Thank you, too, to my early readers. I hope you enjoyed my novel - literary crime, set in the Scottish Highlands and featuring a police detective who is diagnosed with Addison's Disease mid-way through the story. Thank you to those of you who've left reviews and ratings!
Addison's is an auto-immune condition in which the body's own defences attack the outer layers of the adrenal glands. It's a slow and insidious condition, yet it can become horribly dangerous. Our adrenals tick along at only about 10% production until we need to fight off a bug, or break an arm, or face intense emotional stress. Then production surges. The trouble is, if your adrenals' outer layers have been largely destroyed by your own body, you just can't produce the increase in cortisol needed to cope with those stressors.
And that's when you have an Addisonian Crisis. It's scary. And it can kill you.
Read about it on the ADSHG website.
People diagnosed with Addison's take medication every day for life (literally), and carrying an emergency injection kit is definitely recommended. I last used mine two years ago when I ordered a gluten-free chocolate brownie in a cafe and thoroughly enjoyed it, only to realise three hours later when I was dying on the floor that it couldn't have been gluten-free after all. The emergency injection kit I'd got from the ADSHG, coupled with the medication from the health service, saved me.
Please do consider buying the ebook or paperback of White Spirit. If you do, you'll be helping support the ADSHG as I'm giving them my royalties.
To read my previous blog posts about my diagnosis and recovery, follow these links. (You'll be able to tell that I was (ahem) slightly overdosed on steroids in my earliest post about it!) You can also read about the ebook compilation Second Chances: true stories of living with Addison's Disease, which my partner Keith published for me through his imprint The PotHole Press in 2012.
First post - Growth Cycle
https://carolmckay.blogspot.com/2010/10/growth-cycle.html
Second post - The Real Story
https://carolmckay.blogspot.com/2010/10/real-story.html
Third post - Second Chances: true stories of living with Addison’s Disease
https://carolmckay.blogspot.com/2012/11/second-chances.html
Fourth post - Second Chances on the BBC
https://carolmckay.blogspot.com/2013/02/
Fifth post - Ten Years. Two Little Pills
https://carolmckay.blogspot.com/2020/10/
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