![]() "To go from being unable to finish my previous attempt to finishing this one that meant so much more to me personally because of the subject matter-it’s something that I can't describe in words very well. The excitement that I have always felt about learning came back and, for the first time in three years, it felt like my brain fog had lifted."įinally, in 2017, Schultz earned their degree. “I could work on classwork, group projects, and attend virtual classes without having to worry about germs, parking, or even wearing pants! Once I got back into the grove of attending classes, I felt amazing. "Going to school online was such a better fit for me,” Schultz says. But this time, they enrolled in an online program to better protect their health. In 2015, they began a new master’s degree in health administration with a focus on patient advocacy. Schultz had found a new path, perhaps the one they were always meant to follow. ![]() ![]() “Seeing what happens on the healthcare-system side and combining that with what I've seen from the patient side pushed me to want to help improve the overall system,” they say. They got married, continued with their advocacy work, and even started a new job at the local medical school, which opened their eyes to whole other side of health care, especially the quality-improvement process. Doing all this helped me truly feel like I was giving back.”īy 2014, Schultz felt like their life was starting to pick back up. “I was working with not only the AF but also with the International Autoimmune Arthritis Movement, National Arthritis Research Foundation, and other arthritis-based orgs. “After that, my volunteering picked up,” Schultz says. They also started volunteering, just a few hours a month at first, with the Arthritis Foundation’s Arthritis Ambassador Group as way to help enact change, and soon was invited to speak at events. “Researching topics to write led me to writing for other organizations and to some really cool opportunities such as attending conferences using a press pass.” “It was an outlet for me to process what I was dealing with-and help others by talking about it,” they explain. One of the first things Schultz did was put their energy into their blog.
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