https://issuu.com/branksomehall/docs/bh_theread_dec22_final/s/15189272
THE LIFE OF POLITICS GIRL
Leigh ELLIOTT McGowan’94 is immersed in U.S. aff airs as a vibrant online opinion maker—even as she fights a debilitating health condition
BY BERTON WOODWARD
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She has a blog called “In Case I’m Gone,” which started as letters to her son Lochlan after the terrible diagnosis she received in 2008 when he was just six months old. She had become weak and short of breath, no longer able even to dance as she loved to do. That led to the surreal moment when a trio of doctors gravely informed her she had pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare lung/heart disease.
“They were all dead silent and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to die from it, right?’ And there was silence in the room. And I said again, ‘I’m not going to die from it, right?’ And then one of the doctors said, ‘Well, everybody dies.’ I went, ‘What?’” In fact, they told her, the disease had a common life expectancy of two to three years.
Well over a decade later, she is still alive. But she still has the incurable disease. New drugs came along that extended her lifespan, but she knows her health could go south at any time. Even so, she can be an engaging storyteller about her debilitating condition, in her ever-intense style.
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