How To Build Back Your Strength After a Rheumatoid Arthritis Setback
In my 5+ decades of living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), I’ve learned that setbacks are inevitable, whether caused by flares, difficulty finding effective treatment, overdoing it, or injuries. Once the flare ends or an injury improves, you need to build back your strength and stamina, but sometimes exercise can be complicated by the state of…
Tired of Being Tired: 10 Pro Tips for Coping with Rheumatoid Arthritis Fatigue
I have lived with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for over five decades and for me, one of the most debilitating symptoms is the fatigue. I’m not alone in dealing with this symptom. In fact, according to the Talk Over RA website, 79% of people who live with RA also have fatigue. RA fatigue is very much…
65+ Ways to Hone Your Craft and Reach More People for Bloggers, Writers, and Chronic Illness Advocates
If you are doing anything online, one of your goals is to be more effective and reach more people. But let’s face it: staying on top of trends and algorithms while you are producing quality content is exhausting. For those of us who live with chronic illness and limited amount of energy that means cutting…
February 2021 Chronic Journeys with My Guest Daniel P. Malito
On the latest episode of Chronic Journeys, I talk to Daniel P. Malito about growing up with juvenile arthritis, stretch marks and opioids! Get Dan’s book So Young: A Life Lived with Rheumatoid Arthritis. This post may contain affiliate links. If you click on the link and make a purchase, I may receive a small…
Fine-Tune Your Goals and Up-Level Your Impact for Bloggers, Writers, Dreamers, and Chronic Illness Advocates
We become bloggers, writers, and advocates in the hope that our unique message will find an audience, one that will hopefully grow. Some do it as a passionate side thing, others as an equally passionate way to make a living that actually means something. And every single one of us have to figure it all…
Accessibility Wins (and We Meet the Prime Minister)
This past Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the federal government is giving Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) $1.34 billion for repairs. And! 20 percent of that is earmarked to improve accessibility. And I got to meet him. But more on that later. The National Housing Strategy and accessibility You have read about the…
Access/No Access: The Quest for an Accessible Hotel Room
I had to be out of my apartment for week while my landlord installed new flooring to replace the one that had been destroyed in a flood. But first, I decided to check out a few accessible rooms in hotels near my neighbourhood to see which would best fit my needs. Starting with a surprise…
Get Savvy — a New Movement for Patient Insights
Chronic illness advocacy is pretty much a patchwork and not always as pretty as a quilt. Each condition has its own way of being engaged in feedback to organizations and actually connecting is very much a matter of luck. Savvy Cooperative is changing that. What Is Savvy? “Savvy is an online platform that acts like…
Changing the National Building Code for an Inclusive Canada
I have never visited my sister’s home. I have never been to my partner’s home. If my friends are having a party, I can’t go. My partner and I can’t live together. Housing in Canada is usually not accessible to people who use wheelchairs. It contributes to isolation — you might even call it segregation…
Living in Place: Fighting to Increase Accessible Housing
We have an accessible housing crisis. This will get worse as the population ages — not in some far-off future, but rather immediately so when the silver tsunami hits in a few years. Despite this, developers exclude accessibility in their design, continuing to build barriers to people with disabilities. This exclusion is in violation of…
Fighting for Inclusion: Some Days the Battle is All Uphill
There are days where you hardly notice you have a chronic illness or disability. You move through your day effortlessly a, whatever accommodations you’ve made are by now second nature and hence unnoticeable. Wherever you go, people are helpful, removing barriers to make sure you are included Last Saturday was the opposite of one such…
In Which I Appear on Facebook. Live.
The night before I dreamed that I was late to this first-ever Facebook Live event that I hosted on Friday. I’d gotten held up by the tornado, but somehow managed to get there anyway. Then the lights went out as a massive natural disaster commenced. I couldn’t find my notes, so I talked for a…