Apr 09 2018
4 Comments
Emotions

With Friends Like These …

A BBC journalist has himself been in the news recently.

He is disabled, and quite rightly needs to use a disabled parking space.

So far, so good and I read his article in a weekend newspaper with a keen interest.

Until, that is, he stated that he had never yet seen a disabled person park in them; they all looked non-disabled. To him.

I’ve done some research and his complaint is not new – Boris Johnson even wrote an article citing him and his parking issues back in 2011.

I’m interested in how he can ‘spot’ a disabled person and whether in fact they do, ‘bound(s) out, whistling, remote-locking (their cars) with a backwards squirt of electrons.’

I wonder if, in the interest of his being a journalist, he has ever used his unique position to question these blue badge ‘frauds’. Perhaps strike up a conversation with one of those ‘bounders’?

Apparently not. Which renders his views utterly subjective and not based in reality or fact.

I have every sympathy for this journalist. Of course, he needs the extra space for his wheelchair that a disabled space affords. And, of course, there are many people looking to park in the same spaces as they too are disabled.

Essentially, there are not enough disabled spaces, and therein lies the problem.

So to broadly sweep a dismissive brush over every person he has ever seen park in a disabled space as ‘not disabled’ is breathtakingly insulting.

The Invisible Disabilities Association defines invisible disability as:

‘… symptoms such as debilitating pain, fatigue, dizziness, cognitive dysfunctions, brain injuries, learning differences and mental health disorders, as well as hearing and vision impairments. These are not always obvious to the onlooker, but can sometimes or always limit daily activities, range from mild challenges to severe limitations, and vary from person to person.’

Can this journalist see pain? Feel fatigue? Heat intolerance? All of which are valid MS symptoms, to mention just one illness that has invisible symptoms.

It’s hard enough being attacked by the Government through punishing benefits ‘reforms’ and not being at all represented in the last parliamentary election, even though 1 in 6 of us is disabled.

So to be attacked by ‘one of us’ (even though he clearly places himself above that) seems particularly harsh.

Aligning himself with the Blue Badge Disbelievers may gain him Brownie points and a few headlines, yet he does us all irreparable damage.

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Apr 05 2018
16 Comments
Emotions

Really? Was It?

According to the dictionary, ‘gaslighting‘ is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.

I remember watching the old 1940’s film, ‘Gaslight’ as a kid, the husband manipulating the wife into believing she was losing grip on reality.

Never has the term ‘gaslighting‘ been more apt than today, when thousands of us with indefinite Disability Living Allowance awards are being reassessed for Personal Independence Payments.

You thought you had MS? Parkinson’s? Think again.

You thought you had problems with balance, walking, cognition? Think again.

You’ve taken the time and immense effort to fill in the 40-page form (which essentially amounts to writing the equivalent of 14+ essays). You’ve endured the stress and fear of losing what is for some the only payment between you and poverty (it certainly is in my case).

You have also probably gone through the extremely difficult process of raking through your life, highlighting just what you cannot do, after years of trying to be upbeat, contribute to the community and in short, remain an active member of society.

Yesterday, I was slumped on the sofa after work, The Teenager slumbering safely upstairs in his old bedroom after a night out catching up with friends, back for the Easter break from University.

Despite my fatigue and pain, I felt proud I was still working and I was still able to maintain our home of 14 years.

However, reading through my PIP Award (never has a word been so misused) Letter, I felt deep confusion. I was reading about someone else. This never happened. I don’t recognise the assessment in the letter, and neither did my witness.

With an illness such as MS, this seems particularly cruel, as the diagnostic process can seem similarly confusing.

For months, years for a lot of people, we try to make someone ‘in charge’ make sense of our random bundle of symptoms. They often don’t hang together well (we all get tired, we all feel a bit buzzy around our feet at the end of the day?).

Even six years after my diagnosis, I still feel like a fraud – how can you possibly describe what it’s like to have MS when so many of our symptoms are internal? And internal, impossible-to-see symptoms are easy to dismiss.

And this is despite me having highly-active, or rapidly-evolving MS, for which I’ve had Lemtrada treatment three times, one more than the standard two. It’s a brutal treatment and not one undertaken lightly.

During my PIP assessment, I was led, confused and upset. Not true apparently. I was well-dressed, confident and happy. Who to believe?

Who do you believe?

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Apr 02 2018
6 Comments
Emotions

A Date With Fate

People often say, if you think too hard about the best time to have a child, you never will.

It’s the same with car crashes and disabilities.

If you’d asked my 23-year-old self if I had the time and resilience to be involved in a near-fatal car accident, necessitating six months off work, I’d have laughed. But it happened.

Forward 14 years and if you’d asked me on Friday 24th June 2011 whether – as a divorced mother of an 11 year old – I was ready for a serious, degenerative illness to suddenly pop up and change my life forever, I’d have laughed my head off. I had far too much to do, how could I possibly fit it in?

Yet it happened – I went to bed that evening as usual and woke up in a completely different body, one I barely recognised.

The surprise element in these three scenarios can be overwhelming for people like me, who think they knew where they’re going.

Just like that, you don’t.

I often think back to that fateful evening and wonder if I truly appreciated my life, as it was, when I closed my book, fluffed up my pillow and turned out the light. I don’t think I did.

Sure, I had a plan, and it was a good one – possibilities were opening up as The Teenager entered high school and the tethers of childcare were loosening. I would also lose that extra weight, learn how to apply eyeliner and rustle up a mean Martini.

MS hit and I went under. For two years. It was almost as if I refused to believe that it had actually happened. I was grieving for what could have been and what should have been. It was all so … unfair.

It’s only now I realise that it wasn’t so much the MS that rocked my life (**** happens?), but my inability to recognise that life had changed and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. A bit like the car crash.

Almost seven years on from that day, I am serene, calm and accepting.

Nah, not really.

But – I’m much more flexible in my approach to life, unlike my body, which is often rigid, wracked with weird vibrations and does the strangest things.

So many awful things have happened since MS but none now have the power to shock me quite as much. When life events drop down the shock-scale, it’s rather nice. When MS happens, what can be worse?

Oh, wait, I forgot about The Department of Work and Pensions …

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Mar 31 2018
2 Comments
Symptoms and Treatment

Out In The Open

I realised something quite profound the other day.

My life since the age of 13 or so has been divided neatly in half by two very different medical problems.

And not only that, one was visible (far, far too visible) and one is by and large invisible, to most people anyway.

And it is this issue of ‘visibility’ that makes me stop and think, and one which links both problems.

For over 20 years, I had incredibly bad acne. To many people, this might be a case of, ‘so what?’ But believe me when I tell you I went through absolute hell. It was difficult enough enduring it throughout school (you can only imagine), but for it to continue well into my 30’s was horrific and dominated my life entirely.

I would go to bed every night for two decades, praying I would wake up with clear skin. Very few people ever saw me without thick make-up (I tried all the foundations under the sun), but none of them could ever disguise the angry skin flaring up underneath. The more I tried, the more I failed.

I simply can’t begin to explain how my skin affected my life. My face was the first thing people saw and every time someone looked at me, a little piece of me died inside. I knew exactly what they saw, and I felt humiliated and ashamed.

And then, just as my skin cleared up, MS hit.

I wonder whether it is my experiences of hiding away, saying no to so many things (so many regrets) and generally shunning the best that life can offer that has made me so vocal about living with MS.

This time, I refuse to hide. It’s tempting, very tempting. In light of the DWP debacle, part of me is seduced by the idea of doing what they ask, shutting my front door and retiring politely from public view. And I remember exactly how that feels, from years and years of experience.

But I won’t hide and now I have the reverse problem – having to work endlessly to prove to people that I actually have a medical issue. It’s quite bizarre.

Ultimately, what can I learn from this? Am I trying to overturn my ‘mistakes’ from before? If I am, bring it on! Perhaps if social media and blogging had been around ‘back in the day’, I would have evolved into a proud ‘reclaim acne’ teenage blogger.

As it stands, visibility and medical symptoms have been the enduring story of my life. Isn’t it time we reclaimed all health issues as just that – if you’ve got an issue with it, jog on?

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Mar 25 2018
5 Comments
Daily Life

PIP Off

PIP has taken over six months of my life. And I will be reassessed every three years.

Because MS just gets better and better, dont’cha know?.

I first got the ‘invitation’ in October last year.

And now we are facing April, and I’m looking to compile a Mandatory Reconsideration.

The meeting the Assessor described is something I don’t recognise at all. Were we in the same place? Was she actually present? Or did she in fact have her head down the whole time, cutting and pasting paragraphs?

She was angry and upset and willingly told us we were her last on a list of six for that day. Oh, and she had been an A&E nurse, so knew all about MS.

Think for one moment how much detail you can achieve of someone’s life with MS in 55 minutes, excluding greetings, setting up a laptop, asking, leaving?

Yet apparently they can, they know you inside out, they know everything about your life with MS.

In 40 minutes.

According to their own guidelines, a ‘snapshot’ of life should not be a guider in a DWP decision. And, in fact, neurological, incurable illnesses such as Parkinson’s and MS are decreed unnecessary for a face to face assessment.

But still it happens. I’m not the same person I was six years ago, but under new guidelines, I am better, recovered, cured.

Huh?

Yet this less than, shall we say, 40 minute, assessment, could be the difference between independence and complete reliance upon the state.

I want to keep working. I want to stay engaged. But this takes the biscuit.

What do you hope to achieve by stripping us of our lifelines?

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