Oh, Brother: Disability and Romance
Updated June 14, 2020 “Is that your brother?” We get this all the time, The Boy and I and I don’t know why, except that we are both somewhat rounded and wear glasses. Well, that’s not actually true, because I do know why. It’s because able-bodied men don’t date women in wheelchairs. To be even…
My Best Friend
Jenni over at ChronicBabe chose “My Best Friend” as the theme for this week’s Blog Carnival. At first, I was going to skip this one – I am in the extremely lucky position of having several people in my life who qualify as best friends. Choosing only one didn’t feel right and writing a post…
7 Habits of A Reasonable Life
Hello, world. So nice to see you again – have you lost weight? Got a new haircut? Whatever you’ve done, you look fabulous. I, on the other hand, probably look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. Twice. The last two or three months have been hard and crazy and utterly unreasonable. I developed…
Sugar Beach Accessibility Tour
Remember my attempt to get to Sugar Beach? And remember how Bruce Sudds, the Communications Manager for Waterfront Toronto wrote me an e-mail committing to making some changes? And remember that Community Planning Meeting? At that meeting, my MPP Glen Murray – who is a thoroughly decent man with a passion for universal design –…
Range of Motion
I took a lot of photos that night. I love my camera, but it isn’t very fast in the dark, so every image was slightly fuzzy. I found a bench and tried to rest the camera on that, leaning out over my left armrest to find a surface that was reasonably flat, but still a…
Speaking About the Unspeakable: How RA Affects Your Sex Life
I’m in a rheumatologist’s office, discussing starting methotrexate. This is long before the miracle of Enbrel and Humira, my first shot at one of the more serious drugs for RA, but my disease is flaring and something needs doing. Methotrexate is the gold standard and can be very effective. It is also very toxic so…
Might Need Asbestos Clothing for This One
Yesterday, I read a post by Trisha Torrey over at About.com’s Patient Empowerment area. It was about the possibility of a convicted child rapist named Kenneth Pike being considered for heart transplant. She presented the issues and asked for readers opinions. This is my comment: “One of the reasons I am a monthly support of…
Sugar Beach News
Interesting things have happened and I feel compelled to share. For those of you who haven’t read the original post, as small recap. A wonderful recreational area called Sugar Beach opened last summer in my neck of the woods and about three weeks ago, I went to check it out. Only to discover that there…
Sensitive to the D-Word: A Disability Discrimination Test
Updated March 5, 2021 When you mention the D-word (discrimination) in connection with people with disabilities you get the funniest reactions. People sort of wince, they cringe, they even get angry and question your conclusions. It’s as if they have accepted the concept of discrimination against other groups, such as racial minorities, women and aboriginal…
Invisible, Visible
I was at the grocery store, picking up a few things, moving from the back of the store to the front because I’m compulsively organized. The last item I needed before heading for the checkout was a loaf of bread and I headed to the ice cream and bread products aisle. Once there, I positioned…
The Path to Sugar Beach
Settle in folks, this one’s a bit long…. We have a large amount of waterfront here in Toronto, nestled as we are along the shores of Lake Ontario. For a very long time, there’s been talk of revitalizing the waterfront and not too long ago, the three levels of government (municipal, provincial and federal) got…
Me & My Shadow
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. Well, now they call it Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, but a rose by any other name is still a pain in the arse. I have lived with RA for over four decades and there are times when I’ve thought about how even really bad…