Hello everyone! This is the first post in the newly made Disability and accesibility community. Feel free to post anything health, chronic illness, disability or accesibility related. If you need a space for support or sharing your experiences regarding all of the above topics, this is the right place as well :)
Hey everyone! I’m happy to be here. I have ME/CFS and recently got in to see a rheumatologist for the first time. Suspected Sjogren’s (I have many of the symptoms), but my first tests came back negative. Apparently it takes 8 years, on average, to get a diagnosis. For now, loading up on my eye drops / nasal spray / dry-mouth everything at all times.
Hi all! I’m here on behalf of my partner of 26 years, who was dx’d with Alzheimer’s (plus a big serving of depression and anxiety). She’s been a longterm disability rights advocate (seizures, hard enough of hearing that she signs—or used to, has been socially withdrawing, and memory + Alzheimer’s… well, you know). When she got the official dx, I joked to her, “well, you were always proud of being Disabled—now you’ve got the Great Mother of all disabilities.”
Hi everyone! I’m an autistic person, I have ADHD, along with a couple of other ones I generally don’t talk about online for various resons.
I just want to say, “Hi.”
My interest in this community stems from having a stutter, depression, and social anxiety. I also work in web development and am always interested in learning more about web accessibility. For the most part, my conditions don’t affect my ability to use the web, so I always feel like there’s lots of room to grow there. (Too bad the folks at Reddit don’t care much about that. Looking forward to the blackout.)
Hello. I’ve been chronically ill for decades, with many symptoms going back to my earliest childhood memories. Dx are fibromyalgia, ME/CFS and FND (functional neurological disorder, which basically means something happens in the brain and then something weird happens in the body, and they’re related, we don’t know why and aren’t much fussed to find out). I also had unDxed endometriosis, possibly for 20 years, as well. Because GPs have been so unhelpful, I’ve had to teach myself a lot. Nutritional approaches have helped me the most.
Unhelpful doctors - such a classic and very relatable unfortunately. I wish us all more empathetic and competent medical proffesionals.
Hi everyone! I am a person with mental disorders, Asthma, prediabetes, and the developing of thyroid issues who has been put on disability benefits due to my inability to find and or maintain work. If anyone ever has any questions about Ontario’s disability support program, feel free to ask me and I’ll try my best to help out. I am not a social worker but I have had to grudgingly read a lot of those horrible, horrible documents and rules relating to ODSP in my experience with them.
By the way, just a reminder to my fellow Canadians that there’s supposed to be a federal-wide disability benefit program being introduced one day in the distant future. It’s not happening now, but it received “yes” from pretty much everyone and finished it’s third reading back in May. I am sadly not as politically knowledgeable as most people, so I don’t know “wtf does that even mean”, but it’s apparently good news! Yeah!
Hello everyone. I’m a 37(m) with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and too many cats.
Is there truly such a thing as too many cats? Hard to believe ;)
Hello. I’ve been having trouble with my sight (basically it gets blurry suddenly and I can’t see thing that are at a close or middle distance. At the beginning the “blur” only affected the view of things near me, but it’s been getting worse) and to feel my arms and legs, which of course affects my mobility. Apart from being in pain almost constantly
Finally, a year ago I was diagnosed with several issues in my vertebral column, including cyst in my cervical vertebrae, that doctors have told me will never go away.
The issue with my sight seems to be at a muscle level, but my doctor cannot be sure until she can compare two visual field test. I’ve just had my second one last week (the other was last year when I started to make appointments with her after struggling for years with specialists that told me nothing was wrong and that they were no changes in my visual), so luckily it won’t be much time until I get a diagnosis.
To make things worse, I’ve started to have heart issues and my last ECG (a simple one and holter) came with bad results. But I don’t have an appointment with a cardiologist til July.
I also have hyperacusis and bad fine motor skills that I don’t know if I was born with or were a product of the epilepsy I had from age 3 to age 14.
I’ll comment about myself too. I am neurodivergent in more than one way and have a couple of chronic illnesses, that when separated, would be mostly just a minor annoyance, but when bundled together become a major pain in the ass (both metaphorically and literally).
