The other day, I watched my husband, Jared, handle a parenting moment in a way that surprised me. He didn’t scold or lecture our young daughter. He didn’t swoop in with a tidy “lesson learned” speech. Instead, he did something that some parents might find unconventional and even controversial: He…
HemoWife — Allyx Formalejo
Allyx Formalejo, or Cza, is a writer, entrepreneur, and digital marketer based in Marikina, Philippines. She is married to Jared, who has severe hemophilia B and a seizure disorder. They have a young daughter and two other “babies” — a dog and a cat. Cza herself is diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar II disorder. This allows her to offer a unique perspective on navigating various aspects of young adult life (e.g. relationships, career, and parenting) with chronic health conditions. In her free time, she enjoys collecting fountain pens, supporting small businesses, traveling across the country, and exploring local cafes. She continues to blog like most 90s kids did in the Internet’s early years, sharing her thoughts and interesting discoveries on her personal website, czaofalltrades.com.
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One of the stranger skills I’ve developed in my marriage to someone with hemophilia isn’t medical — it’s domestic. It’s the art of removing blood stains. To be fair, I already had some experience dealing with blood simply by being a female person who menstruates. But when you’re married…
When I traveled with HAPLOS, the Hemophilia Philippines Foundation, about six years ago to visit families with bleeding disorders in rural provinces, I expected hardship. What I didn’t expect was how drastically the same diagnosis could play out depending on where and how you lived. My husband, Jared,…
Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a social media channel that captures slices of my everyday life. On the surface, that might not sound unusual. Plenty of people create online spaces to document what they love, what frustrates them, or what they’ve learned. But for me, the…
Kids have a way of flattening the extraordinary into the ordinary. My 6-year-old daughter once scraped her knee, looked down at the blood, and calmly said, “Like Daddy, because he bleeds.” Then there was the day she spotted a cockroach flipped upside down, thrashing helplessly on the floor. Without hesitation,…
The other day, I asked my husband, Jared, if he’d ever consider leading a harm reduction seminar for the teens in his hemophilia organization. His immediate response was, “Of course — but would the parents be ready for that conversation?” That question hit me. As…
Some days it’s easy to see the cracks in our family’s situation — the unpredictable costs, the logistics of keeping medication on hand, the mental load of being a partner to someone with severe hemophilia B and epilepsy. But every so often, I remind myself that there are…
All my life, I’ve chased achievement. It made me crave purpose. I was once a “gifted child,” even called a genius by the Philippine Daily Inquirer — and briefly, I was a commercial model for milk, too. My innocent 5-year-old face appeared in ads juxtaposing little me with history’s…
As someone with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, I crave a challenge. It doesn’t even have to be a significant one, just something that gives me a little feeling of accomplishment. A small win early in the day, such as solving a tricky problem, tidying a corner of my space, or…
People often assume that loving someone with hemophilia — and in my husband’s case, epilepsy, too — must come with endless patience, unshakable optimism, and the kind of soft, gentle pity we reserve for those we imagine can’t carry their own weight. But mine is a different kind of…
My husband, Jared, and I both have marketing backgrounds. We’re used to thinking in terms of value. In branding, you ask: What makes this product worth noticing? What problem does it solve? Why should people care? It’s strange to apply that mindset to something like hemophilia. But when you…
The other day, I found an old document from my husband Jared’s last hospital stay — the one after his freak accident on a pool slide. I’d written about it before, but seeing the discharge papers brought it all back. The memory feels a little funny to us now…
I recently came across a social media post that hit home. It began: “Never judge someone with a chronic illness if they …” and went on to list things like skipping meds, eating foods that might trigger symptoms, resting all day, or even doing something that looks “wrong”…
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