I am a PhD student in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication program at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. My research interests include patient activism, as well as feminist and digital rhetorics. Specifically, my research focuses on the various ways that patients with rare illnesses share embodied health experiences to build expertise, make decisions, and transform health outcomes. I am particularly interested in how patients use rhetorical strategies to build solidarities over time and place in order to distribute agency, manage risk, and construct collective digital archives of illness. For my dissertation, I am working on an autoethnography of my experiences as a patient and member of an online health community for Asherman’s syndrome, a rare reproductive illness that occurs after surgery for miscarriage or C-section. My symposium project theorizes a collective, networked agency that emerges through the embodied experiences of patients during a rhetorical analysis of postings in an online discussion thread. I believe that building theory from patients’ unique lived experiences can help rhetoricians better understand the important innovations that are occurring within patient communities and can help lead to improved healthcare communication and positive change in the practices of medicine.