Summer Dashe

Temporary coanchors. Forever friends.

It was a privilege being your Matron of Honor. There will never be enough opportunities to return the favor for the support you’ve shown me all these years. Thank you for giving me a chance to be there for you on your wedding day.

You were the most beautiful bride, Alena Lee!

The Officiant & The Matron of Honor: A husband and wife duo facilitating magical matrimony!

I think that’s a wrap! Jon has officiated three weddings for our friends. I’ve been in the bridal party for six. Everyone is now married!

I’ve gotten to walk down the aisle toward my husband more times than most because of his officiating skills. What a gift. It is bittersweet to think this might have been the last one.

Without bachelorette parties and weddings to force us all together, I’m already talking about making vow renewals a thing in our group just to give us the next excuse.

How very lucky we are to hold such close bonds with wonderful people. Congratulations to the newlyweds, Alena Lee and Meteorologist Gerard Jebaily!

It was sooooo special to have some of the ole WPDE ABC15 news team back together in South Carolina for Alena Lee and Meteorologist Gerard Jebaily’s wedding!

Cindy and I had an absolute blast catching up with former ABC-15 coworkers at Gerard Jebaily and Alena Lee’s gorgeous wedding in Murrells Inlet! They may be the most beautiful couple ever, but the fact is, Gerard has officially joined the “I married up” club. Welcome, buddy! You looked stunning Alena!

I’m sure you recognize these faces. Gerard and Alena were part of our weather team together from 2014–2016 and frankly were two of the best I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. Both have had stellar careers and are now on TV in Baltimore.

Also pictured are Summer Dashe (left) and Sydney Glenn (right), two outstanding anchors/reporters who were such an important part of our team. It was so cool to catch up, share stories, and see how well they’re both doing outside of the wild and crazy TV business!

Congrats, Gerard and Alena! Here’s to decades of marital bliss.
❤️❤️❤️

Maid of Honor duties start…now!

I intercepted your family at DFW, Alena Lee! We’ve got a flight full of VIP wedding party members heading your way. The bride’s side is now boarding!

See you soon, Myrtle Beach!

I left my dream career because of these symptoms.

She helped me reroute the dream.

Sending strength to Fidji Simo.

May the work being done at ChronicleBio sustain your hope until better days emerge.

Thank you to all the patients in this space who give so much to research in the pursuit of positive outcomes.

We exist to change outcomes like this.

ChronicleBio Co-founder Fidji Simo recently announced she is taking medical leave from OpenAI due to Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).

It is a jarring reminder of why our entire team is working fast and hard. Simo is one of millions of people facing life-altering symptoms and difficult decisions because of them.

Conditions like POTS, ME/CFS, and Long COVID, which frequently overlap, remain poorly understood, leaving patients without FDA-approved treatments. At ChronicleBio, we are building a multimodal data platform designed to unlock answers by combining biospecimens, wearable data, and clinical records to generate AI-driven insights into disease biology.

The research is complex, but our goal remains simple. We aim to move from fragmented understanding to actionable insight to targeted therapies so patients like Fidji can get better, sooner.

In just our first year, hundreds of participants have enrolled in the Chronicle I Study through our clinic partners around the world. Our scientists are already generating early signals across complex chronic conditions and have identified multiple potential drug targets.

So, to our courageous co-founder, and all patients who have lost pieces of their identities to chronic illness:

We know why we are here.
We know what is at stake.
We are determined.

With love from the lab,
The ChronicleBio Team

I would crawl across this country even if it killed me to celebrate you, Alena Lee! Can’t wait to get her married in just a few weeks back in South Carolina where it all began. 🤍

This time last week I had hope. The family group text was abuzz. I told a friend it felt a little like Christmas Eve. I was anxious, but excited that the next day I might be getting the gift of a diagnosis and clear treatment.

That didn’t happen. And that’s really hard.

Tonight I’m on hour two of what has become my dreaded nightly routine: Lie down, sit up, lie down, stand up, lie down, walk around, lie down. This “recalibrating” goes on for hours until I’ve somewhat regulated the pressure in my head enough to tolerate lying down and fall asleep.

For months, I’ve been clinging to the hope that there’s an end in sight. Tests were finally starting to show things that would make sense of all of this and as I waited for the big NY trip to confirm it, it was as if I was getting through a chronic pain marathon.

“The finish line is closer now. You’re going to make it,” I’d tell myself. “Just a little longer and you’ll have relief.”

As my husband watched me squirm in my chair during the day trying to settle back pain and writhe in my bed at night trying to regulate the pressure in my head, he’d say the same thing. We are so close. When the surgeon told me he’d found nothing after my procedure last week, I asked everyone not to tell Jon yet.

My hope was shattered. I wanted him to get to live in a world with it just a little longer.

Tonight I’m back in the marathon. The never-ending chronic pain marathon. I thought I could see the finish line, but it seems I’ve taken another confusing wrong turn. Although, perhaps this detour did provide some useful directions.

I can’t believe I’m back to this again.

Stamina. Anyone surviving chronic pain has stamina. I have that.

I’m home from NY and back with the puppies.

What a week.

Thank you all for your kindness and support these last few days. I’m exhausted and my brain is so foggy. I’ll share more about the procedure, my follow-up with the surgeon, and next steps soon.

Meantime, Sundae and Bowen seem to be applying pressure to the femoral puncture sites. I think they’re trying to help. 😉

And they are. Most definitely.

I share this update with excruciating understanding that I am not alone in the moment I am experiencing. So many of you have been right where I am. And that makes it both more tolerable and also more gut wrenching to me.

The testing I had yesterday did not show anything to explain my symptoms.

Hearing the surgeon say that was crushing. Nobody warns you that there exists a crevasse between the actively living and the actively dying where those with complex chronic conditions land. Most people think negative or normal results are a good thing. But they’re the most devastating outcome when you’re still symptomatic.

Because if not that, then what? And if not that, then what do I do to feel better? And if not that, then what do I do next? I can’t live like this forever. That’s what it feels like to be young and sick and in the crevasse.

But there are people meeting us there, trying with all their might to yank us out. They’re funding research. They’re processing samples in labs. They’re working tirelessly to get us the answer we want: We found the problem. Here’s the solution.

I am surrounded by those people at work through ChronicleBio. Our science team blows me away. I know as I recover from an invasive procedure that yielded negative findings, they’re working on figuring out more options for patients just like me.

And as the surgeon’s words hit my brain, floating around in my head alongside the dye he’d injected only minutes earlier, I had someone in my ear reminding me I’m not out of options even though it feels like I am. Standing by my mom and best friend was my former boss, Amy Rochlin, the CEO of Complex Disorders Alliance and a fierce leader in the research space. She talked with the surgeon, made sense of the results, and promised me answers will come someday.

I am luckier than most to have the perspective my work affords me. I am not closer to a cure than anyone else due to my proximity to research, but I have clearer line of sight to where we are in the process. Together, we’ll get there.

How?

Donate to organizations like CODA. Participate in research through companies like Chronicle.

And whatever you do…
don’t give up.

The photo below is from dinner the night before the procedure. Thank you, Amy, for showing up for all of us every day, but individually for me this week. It meant more than you will ever know. Although, maybe you do. You uniquely get it. And for that, I am both sorry and so, so grateful.

Studio lighting > Hospital lighting

I’m so grateful you’ve been by my side in both.

Today I’m undergoing a cerebral catheter angiogram and venogram with balloon occlusion and manometry in New York. My best friend and former coanchor drove in from Maryland for the occasion. I hope the neurosurgeon has a sense of humor because if any of you remember us from the morning show we were always laughing and we’re far more unfiltered in real life. 😁

I haven’t posted about my health in a really long time. There isn’t a single perfect reason why.

Part of it is that I became a bit hopeless and I never wanted to share that with the masses if it might harm someone else going through a hard time. I wouldn’t lie or sugarcoat anything, so I decided instead to say nothing at all.

Some of it was that even I felt like I couldn’t make sense of what was happening to me and I’ve always had a rule that I don’t share publicly until I can responsibly speak to something. There’s too much misleading medical information online already and I refuse to risk contributing to it.

I also started feeling embarrassed about my condition. So many people are suffering and here I was with the privilege of seeing specialists, having advanced testing, and traveling for medical care and what did I have to show for it all aside from worsening symptoms?

The last big update I gave was right before I went for a CT Myelogram during the summer of 2024 at the suggestion of my neurologist to look for a cerebrospinal fluid leak. They didn’t find one. I had hoped they would because if that explained my worsening symptoms it would have been treatable.

But my head pressure issues have continued to get worse. My eyelids swell now when I lie down. Sitting too long in my desk chair makes my neck hurt and the head pain increase. I get so foggy. I write far better than I speak these days, and it’s maddening. I used to present and talk on live TV for hours at a time. Now I stumble over words in a 30 minute Zoom meeting.

Most nights I spend about five hours “recalibrating.” That’s what I call it. Lying down, sitting up, standing, walking, lying down again—this attempt at regulating the pressure in my head goes on and on until I can finally tolerate lying down long enough to fall asleep.

I’ll try to share more eventually about the journey to jugular vein compression, but that’s what brings me here today. Recent imaging scans of my neck showed possible compression of the internal jugular veins by surrounding structures—the C1 transverse process, styloid process, and digastric muscle. But I appear to have landed in another medical grey zone, perhaps even a controversial one to some in the field. Is the compression just an incidental finding or is it driving this relentless dysregulation in my head?

That’s what today’s testing is meant to figure out.

There’s a chance I come out of these procedures just like I did after the myelogram with negative imaging and back to square one. And while a healthy person may think “no problem” is a good outcome, a chronically ill person will appreciate how much I hope for a finding we can correct to relieve even some of my symptoms.

So why am I sharing this now after an almost two year hiatus?

Because going down this road of vascular compression reminded me of how this all started and why I shared my story publicly in the first place. It took two years of misdiagnoses before I was correctly diagnosed with POTS in 2019. I was a news anchor at the time and was appalled by how little awareness there was in the medical community. I had a platform to help change that even in a small way, so I did a report on it.

Learning about venous outflow disorders has given me that same feeling again. I wish I’d known about this possibility sooner.

It feels good to talk to all of you again. I’ve really missed hearing your stories and learning from you. I’ll try to report back once I’m up to it, whether the results are good, bad, or confusing. Because continuing to search for ways to improve my quality of life isn’t embarrassing. And if sharing the journey helps someone else, then that alone is a meaningful outcome.

For now, I’m grateful to be in the hands of a fantastic neurosurgeon, to have access to this testing, and to spend the day with my best friend.

When I took that job at WPDE ABC15 11 years ago I thought I was getting a great opportunity. I was. But the friendships I gained have far eclipsed the career experience.

That meteorological reference was for you, Alena Lee. 😎 Thanks for being the moon to my sun!

See? Let the jokes begin…

Selling Someday…

When I built Someday Cottage, I truly believed we’d hold onto it forever. Nearly every week since we opened the arched front door to guests last May, someone new has filled the house with life. People have shared memories with their kids fishing in the backyard, celebrated holidays with family by that iconic fireplace, and gathered with friends on the porch where you can truly listen while admiring the mountains.

The photos, messages, and stories I’ve received from visitors have meant more to me than they will probably ever know. They honored my dad in the most beautiful way possible: by actually living the memories he never got to make.

For those who haven’t read the Someday Story, it’s still up on StaySomeday.com, but I decided to build the lake house after he died. He always wanted a house on the water…someday.

He also raised me to chase dreams. To welcome opportunity. To be unafraid of fighting for what I believe in. A few years before he died he was interviewed about my condition and tearfully said, “I tell myself that someday they’ll cure it.”

So while you can imagine how excruciating this decision has been, I believe the ultimate Someday is still out there and so did he. It’s the day when the condition I, and millions of others, suffer from is cured. The techbio company I work for is opening its first headquarters in California and I will be joining our team there to chase that goal.

This also means after 18 years, three states, and six moves, I’ll be moving home. Original home. Just a short drive away from where I grew up.

My genuine hope is that whoever buys the cottage discovers the same thing we did the first time we saw the water. When they step inside the house I hope they feel the care in every detail so lovingly designed from the finishes to the furniture to the layout, each chosen with purpose. I hope when they get there they feel peace and healing knowing they’ve made it, finally, to Someday.