The Seated View

    It didn't work . On Friday I had a 1 1/2 hour meeting. It was no big deal - we were meeting on Skype, from the desk in my office area and really shouldn't use too much energy. Or so I thought. Because it turns out that thinking and focusing uses a lot of energy. At about the one hour mark, whatever energy I had left started leaving my body. I wasn't getting tired so much as actually feeling energy and strength drain from my body like water from a barrel. By the time we signed off, I had nothing. I felt like RA Guy at the supermarket , unable to move. Perhaps not quite as catastrophic, but I could see it from where I was. This has never happened to me before. I've been tired, felt exhausted, known that the crash was imminent, but never experienced such a profound low in energy without being quite sick. I managed to scrape together some lunch and it helped the dizzy and the nausea a little. Had a nap, a weird one with what felt like fever dreams, h...

    By noon last Tuesday, I was exhausted. This is not a good sign two days into the work week. I kept going, pushing through the haze of tired and somehow made it to the weekend. Saturday was spent moving in glue and looking with dread at a week filled with entirely too much, but not knowing what to do about it. When people ask, I say I work part-time. Sometime in the past week, I realized that isn't true. The job that pays me may be part-time, but when you add all the other projects in which I'm involved, you end up with the equivalent of a full-time-and-then-some job. This was a bit of a surprise to me. This also made me feel less freaked out about being so tired all the time. Which brings us back to this past weekend. On some level, I realized I was crashing - starting the day with a Coke to get that shot of caffeine three mornings in a row and it not working was a huge clue - but was at that moronic stage where I was fighting it. I looked at all the me...

     

    On January 23, someone I know forwarded me a link to an article from the Canadian national newspaper the Globe and Mail. The headline "Rheumatoid Arthritis: not the life sentence it used to be" is certainly an attention grabber. And it is a good article. It's accurate in its discussion of the science and it pays close and detailed attention to the consequences of mistaking RA for osteoarthritis.Although it is perhaps slightly rosy in implying that everyone can go into remission, it is one of the best articles I have seen on the topic in a very long time. So… what am I on about today, then?     Does this look confined? I am on about a phrase. The second sentence of the article is as follows: "Within a month, Cheryl Koehn, a former Olympic volleyball player, was in agony as more than 35 joints in her body became so swollen that she was wheelchair bound."  Can you guess what phrase I'm about to give a rant? G’head. Guess. I...

    Show Us Your Hands! Launches Photo Book Project to Help Raise Awareness of Inflammatory Arthritis (February 14, 2012) - Show Us Your Hands! is pleased to announce its Photo Book Project, the latest in a series of successful initiatives aimed at uniting the community of individuals who are living with inflammatory arthritis, and increasing the public’s awareness of this group of diseases. This photo book will showcase both the hands and the stories of people from around the world who are proud of the fact that no matter how much pain and damage their hands have incurred, their hands still work, and their hands still do. Starting today, Show Us Your Hands! invites individuals who wish to be included in this photo book to submit a brief explanation of what their hands do, and why their hands are special. A Call For Submissions form is available online at www.showusyourhands.com/photo-book-project . The deadline for entries is March 2, 2012. Individuals wh...

     This weekend, we took the Tinks to the Royal Ontario Museum so they could see dinosaurs - 'scuse me, DINOSAURS! - for the first time. Liam quickly found one and posed happily We'd rented a wheelchair for Mormor (Danish for Grandma) so she could enjoy the day instead of walking miles. I think the kids enjoy having adults down at their level.  We spent lots of time looking at information screens and comparing it to the skeletons. Watching the kids react, each in their different way was a treat. During the first hour or so, Morgan had the Face of Wonder pretty permanently, took her time to absorb one thing, then move on to another. During the same time, Liam... well. He pinballed. It's the only way to describe it. He was so excited, he bounced from one thing to another with the speed of light. It's why I have no photos of him from that first hour - well, none that aren't a blur of movement, that is. After he'd gone through the Ba...

   It is almost Valentine's Day and tales of love flutter about wherever you look. They are like verbal cupids with wings made of verbs, nouns, adjectives and altogether improper punctuations, for love brings with it a gush of emotion not responsive to the strictures of grammar. And these tales of love are this year joined by other, slightly odd declarations of fervent admiration and all-encompassing joy. For this year, Dave is running the February Disability Blog Carnival and has decreed a theme of love , but not in the traditional sense. This year, we're writing about love we have for the things that make the world accessible to us. I have two and I couldn't choose between them, so today is the double gush of love. With one, I have the kind of relationship that makes you choose the "it's complicated" as your status on Facebook. Because with this one, love has not run smooth. In fact, love has run decidedly un-smooth and she has made it very diffi...

     

    Every year (more or less) on this day, I participate in the Bloggers Silent Poetry Reading on the Feast of St. Brigid. I’ve never been able to find out how it originated, but went with the flow of what I saw around me, posting poems I liked. I’ve posted an ode to nature by the 17 th century poet Thomas Traherne, a poem about grief by Pablo Neruda and one of myown , as well. This year, I found out what this silent poetry reading is all about and it turns out I’ve been doing a sort of amended version. Because seven years ago, this started as a pagan bloggers’ celebration of the goddess Brigid, patron of poets, healers and midwives.  The idea was to post your own poem to Brigid. I like that. A lot. I’m still going to continue my tradition, though, posting a poem I like, rather than one I wrote myself. Still, this year is very much connected to Brigid. It has been two years since we lost out beloved Claire and we are still raw and hurting. Thi...