We Made A Big Move To Seattle Washington!

We’ve got BIG moving news… For anyone who guessed we’d be making a move to Seattle – You were RIGHT! We’ve both lived in San Diego for a good portion of our lives: it’s where we grew up, went to high school and where all of our doctors/extending health practitioners reside. Although this seems sudden, we’ve actually been considering the Pacific Northwest for a long time and for lots of reasons: we wanted a change but didn’t want to brave horrendous winters back east where we were born (New York) or, more importantly, brutal long summers; we wanted to stay within a short flight of our rheumatologist (he is THAT big of a deal to us); we wanted to change things up in general but still do it reasonably. A really big issue for us in Southern California has been the heat.

Em: I love heat but only as in warm sweaters and heaters in the car, not 95 degree days that keep me inside trying to stay hydrated enough to function. Kate doesn’t like the heat at all – her POTS gets much worse when she gets overheated and this is always a problem for her. We thought the move would be to Portland, but after Kate’s boyfriend got a job in Seattle, everything just sort of fell into place for us here.

So far, we love it. People say that California spoils you with good weather, but weirdly enough, our favorite days down south were the gloomy, cold and rainy ones (we’ll see how long that lasts here though). The green and the trees are still new to us and we drive around saying “wow” all the time. There is more traffic than we had anticipated but coming from SoCal we can take this in our stride.

As far as our doctors go, we are sticking with our rheumatologist and cardiologist in San Diego. We are really attached to these doctors and the amount of trust we have in them at this point is just priceless. They are well worth the travel down to see them and we plan to coordinate our scheduled visits so both of us can see both doctors on the same day . Once you get a few bad doctors under your belt, you see just how valuable good ones are, and traveling for good medical care is something we will happily do.

The actual move was way worse than we had anticipated as far as the exhaustion and symptoms flaring. It took us a good 3 weeks to start feeling somewhat normal (our normal). We did everything in our power to plan ahead but still, the changes added up – once you mix a few higher than normal histamine meals and a lack of sleep with a bit of stress the outcome is never good. But we are VERY happy that we did it and are looking forward to a cozy winter.

Although we’ll miss a ton of things about living in San Diego (mainly the awesome Mexican food) we’re really are excited to start exploring around Seattle and to find some of our new go-to spots.

If you have any recommendations (from wellness spas to restaurants and everything in between!) please send them our way!