The Seated View

This past weekend, we headed towards the ferry dock to go to the Islands. Because I haven’t been to the Islands yet this summer and I’ve been having a hankering.  Getting there was an interesting challenge. There’s been some road work along Queens Quay, the street that runs parallel to the lake in downtown Toronto. Big chunks of road have been cut out near the sidewalks, especially by corners and curb cuts. And then these chunks were covered in the initial rough asphalt and left sitting over the weekend. The stretch of road thus being decidedly uneven, and therefore inaccessible to people in wheelchairs, stretched from Lower Jarvis Street to Yonge Street. Because of those chunks being cut out of the road right by the curb cuts by Queens Quay and Lower Jarvis, Cooper and Friedland Streets, there was a 1.5-2 inch drop between the sidewalk and the street, followed by another significant lip to get from the rough asphalt to the regular street. Repeat at every cur...

My friend Cathy issued a challenge for May's Arthritis Awareness Month in the US: live your life outside your blog. She tasked some people she knew, including me, to describe how we share our RA outside our blogs, without it taking over our lives. My guest post appears on The Life and Adventures of Cateepoo today: Photo by David Govoni "There are some distinct benefits to your juvenile arthritis causing you to use a power wheelchair since your teens. For one, no one doubts that I have a chronic illness. The first symptoms of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (or, as it was known in the old days, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis) arrived when I was four years old. It took another five years to get a diagnosis.  Initially, the JIA settled in only in two joints, but when puberty hit, so did the disease. And hard. Fast-forward through a bad systemic flare that almost killed me, fused hips, two years spent lying in a hospital bed waiting for hip replacements,...

  The 2015 Your Life with RA team Someone told me that this year, I had the best reason not to do the Walk to Fight Arthritis, what with still recovering from the crazy health situation . To me, that means there are so many more reasons to do it. I’m alive. Having built up enough strength and stamina to do a 5K before I got sick had, according to my doctors, a lot to do with why I survived and am bouncing back pretty fast. I’m bouncing back pretty fast. A month ago, I barely had enough energy to sit in my wheelchair for two hours. This week, I went back to work. We’ve done the Walk for two years. That means it’s tradition! Earlier this year, I worked with The Arthritis Society on enhancing accessibility for The Walk to Fight Arthritis. I want to see our work implemented. With the exception of some numbness in my hands , I got through a traumatic health experience with very little impact in terms of my rheumatoid arthritis. That has a lot to do wit...

A little over a week ago, this ad ran during the Super Bowl It deals with opioid -induced constipation and is, in my opinion, both discreet and direct, as well as very, very charming. It’s a very subtle ad for a medication that might help , but it is also much more than that, sending a message that people who take opioids are out there in the world among us, normal people living normal lives. And it’s created in partnership with a number of excellent organizations, such as CreakyJoints, For Grace, US Pain Foundation, American Chronic Pain Association and The Power of Pain. Immediately, lots of people made a joke about this being an ad for constipated junkies, Bill Maher among them . But it didn’t stop there. Others were outraged, including the White House Chief of Staff, who tweeted “next year, how about fewer ads that fuel opioid addiction and more on access to treatment.” Seriously. via GIPHY The very first words in the ad are “if you need an opioid to ...