The Icarian

Karen Strickholm: A Posthumous Autobiography Of A Brave Woman, Part 1

Billions have lived and died on this Earth, most leaving nothing more behind of themselves than bones or ash.

Maybe there’s a birth announcement, then an obituary. Maybe there’s some fading photos in an album, a headstone marking a grave. Memories might live on with a couple of generations of direct descendants and relatives, but once they are gone, so is any indication of a life lived.

These days, a bunch of social media posts, and digital photos online may create a temporary unintentional memorial after death.

That’s it.

This is the preface of a mostly autobiographical series of stories by and about my friend, Karen Strickholm, a feisty and sweet woman, who deserves a public memorial even if it is digital. She was a survivor who fought to live and kept a hopeful attitude in a situation that would crush many people.

Introduction/Editor’s Note:

I met Karen Strickholm in the mid-1990s when she was doing public relations work in Hollywood. I was a journalist for a trade magazine covering entertainment and retailing.

Journalists don’t often become long-term friends with public relations people.

But anyone who knew Karen knows she was a NOT an ordinary person, much less an ordinary Hollywood PR type.

She was fun, interesting, well-read, super smart. She was kind, nice, giving, and would go out of her way to help out a journalist.

She was the kind who would take me out to lunch, on her firm’s dime, and we’d talk about business for five minutes, and then spend 85 minutes talking about everything else in the world, often laughing our behinds off.

Long after I’d moved on to other jobs not covering Hollywood, I’d still check in with her, sometimes just a couple of times a year.

When she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the early 2000s, I renewed our long distance friendship, emailing back and forth, a phone call or two.

In 2008, I heard she had significant health issues. A hidden congenital brain tumor on pituitary gland that had slowly been growing triggered a traumatic brain injury, and created a cascade of health issues that took her life apart in the following 12 years.

She relocated to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, in hopes the climate there would help her recover.

The next thing I knew, she was hospitalized, and then in a nursing home.

Then Covid and the lock down began. I didn’t hear from her for three years. I later learned she had contracted Covid and her health had gone haywire.

Mutual connections told me how to get in touch with her. Just by kismet, at about the same time, we connected on the social media site Mastodon.

I followed along for the past three years or so as she had her up and downs, and while she learned to become a champion knitter.

Karen was always getting back up with an optimistic outlook after each time her health dealt her a blow. She kept this good attitude as her income, her business, her investments, her home, all her possessions, and even her pets were taken as her health failed.

I have my own health problems, and Karen’s outlook was exceedingly inspiring.

Karen was always determined that she was going to get better, get well, get out of the nursing home. She learned to knit (her specialty was making Emotional Support Chickens), she kept up with politics, world affairs, other people.

She joined Mastodon on 30 October 2022 after ditching Twitter and had 3,800 followers. When she died, she had more than 19,000 posts on Mastodon. https://mastodon.online/@KarenStrickholm

This was her Mastodon bio:
Zen conscript. 🧘‍♂️ Gentle reader, writer. 📚️ Life-long learner. 👩‍🔬 Warrior. 🏹 Knitter. 🧶 Cook. 🍲 Gin martinis thank you.🍸️Animal lover. 🐕️🐈‍⬛🐍🐘🦎🐝🐢 Outer space. 🪐 Leftie. 🌊 Lover of beauty, arts, humanities. 🙏❤️

Some stuff – Comp Lit PhD student 2 corp coms 2 badass brain tumor 2 #covid 2 recovery 2 new adventures! 💞

As her obit notes, she could make you believe in yourself, and she was selfless.
I’m the proud owner of one of her Emotional Support Chickens. I didn’t ask for one, she just knit it, and sent it last Christmas (2025) as a gift. I was going to call it Henrietta, but now its name is Karen.

One other thing about Karen: she was a great writer.

She would write accounts of what was happening around her, and occasionally send them out.

I tried to convince her collect these writings for a possible book project. But she was busy fighting bigger battles.

Now that she’s departed for the Great Beyond, the Emotional Support Chickens, her other knitting, and her writing are the remaining tangible pieces of Karen. I’ve collected as much of her writing as I could find. I’m going to publish those online as a memorial, a posthumous autobiography of sorts.

She posted 31 March 2026 on Mastodon for the final time:

❤️💨🌳💨📢📢📢💨🌳💨❤️

Pneumonia AND sepsis!!

In midst of sending out last update (ĺink below), air got bad here in Albuquerque NM from huge fire. Came down with #pneumonia + #sepsis. In hospital now. 😞

Struck with extra medical bills, need help to cover ~$2,000. Thanks for nothing to the stinkin’ Rs. Whatever you can toss in the pot, greatly appreciated. Links to contribute here.

The end came quickly. Karen died 6 April 2026. She was 67.

Pneumonia and sepsis can be a quite deadly combination, especially if your health is already compromised and the very air you’re breathing is tainted from wildfire smoke.

At the time Karen passed, I was in an ICU, coincidentally and ironically fighting sepsis and pneumonia, the same things she said she was fighting on her final Mastodon post.

I didn’t find out Karen has passed away until the week of 18 May 2026, a month after I was discharged from the hospital for my romp with spine surgery and complications.

As her final Mastodon post indicated, Karen was struggling with medical debit, like many Americans who have experienced serious illnesses. She was getting help in the form of monetary donations on GoFundMe, and gifts friends would purchase from an Amazon wish list, most of which were things she needed to supplement her medications or make life in a nursing home just a little bit easier.

This is a timeline of her congenital illness and treatment journey, written by Karen Strickholm in January 2025 (lightly edited), while living in a skilled nursing facility, Albuquerque Heights Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico

KAREN STRICKHOLM AND HER EPIC JOURNEY INTO AND OUT OF ILLNESS

16 July 1958 – Born with hidden brain tumor on pituitary gland (as determined later by interior skull bone remodeling).

Note: Pituitary is part of the HPA (hypothalamic pituitary axis). The HPA serves as the “Pentium chip” running the entire body via a complex system of hormones – reproduction, thyroid, adrenals, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, fluid levels, immune system, muscle and bone strength, sleep, metabolism, digestion, sex drive, vitality.

Age 1 to mid-20s – Sometimes outgrew the hidden tumor, body strong, lean, swift. Other times the tumor outgrew me, making body fat, slow, inflamed, painful, frail, extremely fatigued.

But what child has words for that?

Mid-20’s to age 50 (2008) – Tumor continues to grow, compressing the HPA and causing a traumatic brain injury (TBI). A tumor of this type is considered large at the size of a marble; My tumor was the size of an extra-large egg. Most of these tumors are soft, but this one was hard and fibrous.

Symptoms are increasingly severe – breaking bones (including broken back and ribs, shattered radius bone, chronic microfractures in feet), unexplained dramatic weight gain, chronic and near-constant maladies, severe chronic pain, inflammation, unexplained infections, constant headache, extreme fatigue, depression, anxiety and more.

2008 – Diagnosis, brain surgery, and 16 magical months feeling better. Then return of symptoms, tumor regrowth.

2011 – Second brain surgery with complications, medically induced coma, followed by a massive pulmonary embolism shower (high mortality rate), damaging pulmonary artery, blowing up right chamber of heart. Time in a rehab, then home on oxygen.

2012-2015 – Attempt to rehabilitate in Santa Fe, difficulty breathing, difficulty walking. Extreme back pain standing, requiring a walker to move.

Ultimately relocated to Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, for lower altitude and curative hot springs, hoping for a better chance to finally recover. Some ground is taken, but TBI is under-treated.

2015-2020 – All original symptoms return with a vengeance – Chronic pain, infections and illnesses, extreme fatigue, muscle weakness.

Diagnosed with Secondary Addison’s Disease (similar to what JFK had). A small scratch on leg became fugally infected, blooming into six large, painful open wounds that remain to this day.

Medical bills consumed all assets – the company, savings and retirement funds, three-unit home with detached office in Santa Fe, two investment houses in Tor C (Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), vehicles, even the dogs (re-homed).

A lifetime, reduced to boxes.

May 2020 – Pneumonia evolved into septic shock. Heart rate 195 with RVR (stroke territory), followed by critical blood pressure drop in ER.

Nurse happened to be in room, brings me back.

My Grand Tour of medical facilities begins – Sent from Tor C ER to Las Cruces (New Mexico) ICU, stabilized and sent to rehab, then specialty wound care hospital in El Paso, Texas. Recovering nicely, then…

August 2020 – Contracted Long COVID-19. Bad.

Sent to isolation Long COVID ward in El Paso (Texas) hospital, during that city’s peak pandemic moment – you may remember it in the national news.

Spent one month in COVID acute care on 15 liters oxygen, mobile tractor trailer morgues out back, FEMA tents crammed into overflow spaces, Code Blue called near daily all around me, on bi-pap to breath.
It’s touch and go.

Too weak to stand, too weak to walk. In-dwelling Foley installed, remaining in place for next three years.

Fall 2020 through 2021 – Long COVID, coupled with more severe endocrine/TBI symptoms, grinds on.

An addled brain, micro-seizures, double vision, loss of bowel control, severe headache, multiple re-hospitalizations (bouncing from rehab to hospital to rehab, etc.) for cellulitis, pneumonia, UTIs and extreme sinus infections.

Massive IV administration of triple antibiotics, steroids, plasma, iron, fluids, via PICC line from arm to heart to deliver.

Completely bed-bound, unable to stand. Plus, trapped in Texas <ugh> since New Mexico governor had closed borders due to pandemic.

Late 2021 – Moved via ambulance to a bed that finally opens in Roswell, New Mexico, as pandemic ebbs.

Start physical therapy, regain ability to sit upright, stand, pivot, and take a few steps.

However, severe infections continue, each bout triggering heart into Afib and requiring several weeks’ stay in hospital acute care units. Kidneys crash. More massive drugs infused.

Winter 2021-2022 – In ER yet again, struck by rare neurological syndrome called “Critical Illness Myopathy Neuropathy,” similar to Guillain-Barré – instantaneous and total paralysis from the neck down.

Cannot feel torso, legs, arms. Cannot feed myself, turn myself, clean myself. CT scan of my spine reveals a bone scar from a previously undiagnosed spinal break.

Afib returns, does not resolve. Am finally medivaced to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for enhanced medical care.

Cycle of infections continues. Chronically high steroids, needed to survive, causes loss of six upper teeth.

Clinical depression, anxiety.

2023 – Recovery begins anew. At last get under care of an Infectious Disease Specialist, Am prescribed “prophylactic antibiotic therapy” – e.g. antibiotics for life.

In addition to Endocrinologist, begin treatment with Pulmonologist, Nephrologist, Cardiologist, new Wound Specialists. Nerves regenerate, feeling and movement slowly returns.

With Endocrinologist, am able to stand. For the second time in three years, have gone from completely bed bound to standing – the necessary precursor to pivoting and then truly walking.

Those wretched painful wounds continue open, unable to resolve under high steroid dosing.

Strength is returning.

2024 – Another challenge with angry lungs, this time afflicted with COVID plus RSV plus pneumonia plus bilateral lower lung collapse. Then kidney stones. By holiday season am stabilized. Sleep, a lot. Steroids at long last lowered. Wounds start to heal. Accomplish standing yet again.

Now (January 2025) – Doing the daily work to heal this body, charting a new course for this life, preparing for the next chapter.

Standing again.

Have I at long last turned the corner? Seems so.

I move forward now with faith, hope and grace. 💞

NEXT: Part 2, Better Days