I joined PicnicHealth because while we pay exorbitant amounts of money to health systems, very few of them communicate with each other."

Morgan Terry lives and thrives in Central, California with her much-loved husband and their fur-babies. Morgan is a former chef, having graduated from Le Cordon Bleu college for culinary arts. During her career, she first worked in fine dining resorts, serving celebrities and professional athletes in fast, exciting settings. While she loved the rush of fine dining, she and her husband moved home to Central California where she dedicated the remainder of her culinary career to patient dining, student nutrition, Meals on Wheels for impoverished seniors, and using fine dining catering to fundraise for each of these missions in non-profit settings.

In 2013, Morgan’s health took a turn for the worse when she developed a blood clot in her liver which starved her internal organs of blood flow until the organs suffocated and died. During this medical event, Morgan saw and experienced the inadequacies of the medical system first hand as she was repeatedly denied care or treated as a drug seeker. In the end, the delay in treatment resulted in her having 10 open, exploratory abdominal surgeries and being placed in an induced coma to help flush her body of septic infection, which she experienced multiple times.

Despite the medical trauma, Morgan began to recover and return to her career until about a year later when her body began to go haywire. She developed intense abdominal pain, her autonomic systems began to malfunction, and she started experiencing fatigue that felt like she was living life in quicksand, fighting every minute to be free. After some time, her health declined enough that her doctors told her she had a choice between her career and living - and with great reluctance, she pursued disability.

Today Morgan lives as a fully disabled American, but she uses her experiences to help advocate for other patients, including work as a “death doula,” patient advocacy in treatment and diagnosis, and she uses her TikTok account @memyselfnmo to bring attention to the medical biases that lead to her full disablement. In hindsight, doctors understand that the stress of the medical injury and ensuing infections kickstarted autonomic dysfunction, known as Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and eventually activated her Multiple Sclerosis. Her abdominal pain is a result of the multiple surgeries causing her organs to develop adhesion scar tissue which fuses her organs together, resulted in pulling and tearing nerve torsion pain. Morgan has also since discovered she has many blood clotting disorders and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (a connective tissue disorder). She uses her genetic chaos and general in wellness to help her understand and empathize with other patients as she continues to advocate for adequate pain management, equality in treatment between genders, and that doctors, above all, listen to and believe their patients.

Morgan also focuses on continuing to pursue and experience meaningful life experiences, including travel, as a disabled person and sharing her experiences, tips, and tricks with others. She manages her Multiple Sclerosis through treatment at Stanford University and takes the disease-modifying-treatment Ocrevus. Her dynamic disabilities mean that sometimes she can walk without the aid of mobility devices and sometimes she needs help ranging from a cane, rollator, or and up to a powerchair. The point, however, is that she continues to be mobile and live life to the fullest.