The Seated View

Me? A trailblazer? Apparently so, because I had the privilege of being invited to the Trailblazers & Pathmakers event at Queen’s Park hosted by The Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario . On an early April morning, I joined 99 amazing women to discuss issues surrounding women’s leadership. May I get real for a moment? As a freelance writer and advocate (mostly online), my uniform is jeans and other types of comfy clothes. After all, it’s just me and the cat. Finding something that approximately business attire took a while, but I ended up dressing in blue to represent arthritis and accessibility for people with disabilities. We were welcomed by Her Honour, the wonderful Elizabeth Dowsdeswell, who calls herself Ontario’s Storyteller-in-Chief. Committed to showcasing the lives of Ontarians, she hosted this event for women to connect and inspire each other. Other Trailblazers & Pathmakers events will follow in several areas of Ont...

   It's been a couple of very, very busy weeks and all I can say is thank various divinities for vitamin B12 shots. Amazing conveyors of energy in a syringe! However, even with this miraculous bit of boost, I am now so toasted that I'm crispy and plan to spend the next couple of days drooling in front of the TV. Which brings me to the topic of today's post, namely what these silly networks do to shows I like, causing me to have to walk away. Starve Your Female Characters Castle , along with Dancing with the Stars , remains one of the reasons I now am quite fond of Mondays. However, lately they seem to be withholding food from Beckett ( Stana Katic) . She's always been slim, but this season she's nothing but cheekbones. Every time I see her, I want to give her a sandwich. Castle ( Nathan Filion ), on the other hand, seems to have "bulked up" - perhaps every pound she's lost gets moved to him? Moderation, show! Glamourize Your ...

    Perfect comeback #1: Barnes & Noble and Borders in the US have requested that a magazine cover up due to what apparently has a controversial cover: an androgynous-looking man with his shirt off wearing makeup and girly hair. Because, says B&N "the model is young and it could be deemed as a naked female." I've seen the picture (click on the link, it's in the article) and don't see it, but some people spend their lives working really hard to see filth everywhere. In Canada, Lisa Huie, the public relations managers of Indigo and Chapters (our version of the large chain bookstores) says in a statement "[o]ur company provides the choice and availability of a wide range of books and magazines for our customers, even when some books or magazines may contradict the opinions and sensibilities of some customers." Thank you, Lisa Huie, for that bracing reminder. Perfect comeback #2: I was reading the New York Times review of the movie B...

There was another thing that struck me in the New York Times’ Patient Voices feature. What struck me was George’s story, in particular the part where he talks about practicing doing certain things over and over again in order to "appear normal". It struck another of those tender places, because what do you do when you can't? How do you get a positive sense of body image when nothing about you is normal? Last time I looked close to what constitutes normal I was probably around 11 - there were some signs of the RA, mostly in my hands, but I could pass. Since then, in the other 36 years of my life, I've been Different. And no matter what the people who love me say, women with disabilities are most definitely not considered beautiful. When I interviewed Louisa Summerfield and asked about the models on her website , she said "[s]ome people have written to me complaining that I don't have genuine disabled girls because all of them look so hot, they are shocked...

A couple of weeks ago, in response to my rant about the medical literature talking about the alleged hyperalgesia (i.e., lower pain thresholds) in people living with RA, Carrie (sorry - forgot the link) asked a very good question. Namely whether it wasn’t a good thing to identify that RA appeared to lower your pain thresholds, because it would have implications for treatment to better deal with that pain. Good point. Except my concern is - and this would seem to be somewhat substantiated by literature reviewed by RA Warrior that got me ranting in the first place - that the impact on treatment is not towards treating this increased pain, but rather to dismiss it. As RA Warrior says, "[i]t is believed that they [people living with RA] perceive pain to be worse than 'actual pain'". There's a multi-page rant just begging for attention in the assumption that you can measure somebody's “actual pain,” but I'm not going there today (and aren't you gratefu...

I subscribe to a number of HealthCentral writers and a couple of days ago, got the latest notification that Karen Lee Richards (who writes about fibromyalgia and chronic pain) had written another post . It turns out that it was an alert mentioning that Dr. Oz has a segment about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome on today's show. The guest in this segment will be Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum who's written a number of books on chronic pain in fibromyalgia, lives with these conditions himself and is, as Karen describes it, is mentioned by Dr. Oz as the person "who first convinced him that these conditions are indeed very real." And if you've been reading this blog for even a couple of months, you are now imagining me having a total apoplexy, complete with foaming at the mouth, fire shooting out of my eyes and an intense desire to throttle someone. Isn't that nice? I'm so glad that Dr. Oz - whose expert credentials in addition to having a medical...

About six months ago, I finally gave in and joined the Canadian version of Netflix. I'd resisted because I tend to watch movies based on what I'm in the mood for and that's not something you can do when you never know what's arriving next in your mailbox. However, my local video store now has the poorest excuse for a library of old releases I've ever seen and since I love old movies and weird movies, I really had no other choice. And it turns out I may like surprises after all Brief pause to allow a number of my family and friends time to hoot hysterically at the thought of me liking surprises. Done? Right then, moving on. On my list that Rogers Video Direct is a bunch of movies I never got around to seeing for various reasons and last week, The Lake House arrived in my mailbox. And it was better than I'd expected, sweetly mindless, as long as you ignore the gaping holes in the plot. Keanu Reeves wasn’t too bad, although he really made me awar...

I've just returned a pair of size 8 pants because I couldn't pull them up past my hips . This is a very new experience to me. In the past, I've hovered around size 4 or 6 (with temporary excursions into size 8 the two times I quit smoking) and aside from the myriad variations of what constitutes women's sizes - aforementioned size 8 pants stopped exactly at the same point on my hips that my size 6 jeans do - I'm finding that my body has changed. The last two years of being on Humira has not only rendered my blood work normal, but also added weight to my body, changing its shape, likely helped along a bit by middle-age spread. A nd you know what? I welcome it. Because in the summer of 2006, I looked like this Photo by Janne/TinkMama Which is why for several years, there were no photos of me on this blog. I 've always tended towards the slender and muscles atrophied from decades of non-use contributed to that, but when I started Enb...