UNCRPD – Getting Ready to Ratify (1)
"What I’d like to try if I were guaranteed not to fail is to implement the UN Convention on the Rights for People with Disabilities. Too many disabled people all over the world are hurting because of existing inequality, dogma and exclusion. In Ireland for example, people are being denied inclusion and that needs to end now. Getting the Convention ratified so is of major importance, even if/when governments are not interested in doing so."
MS: lesson in minimalism
Can I let you in on a little secret? It’s something meaningful and I’d like to share it with you. Before getting all philanthropic and philosophical, having multiple sclerosis is not a nice thing. Or a happy thing. Not when you’ve just been diagnosed. It’s a long road to acceptance. In between hearing ‘You have MS’ and saying to yourself, ‘You know what, I am OK with that’, you will find yourself falling over (sometimes literally), you will feel awful because of side effects of your medication, and you will sometimes curse at your body’s lack of accomplishments. Being diagnosed is definitely something you never thought would happen to you.
Back with a bang!
I am. In Dublin once again after a short stay with my mum. She moved houses last week but instead of having me pack boxes with her with lots of… well… you know yourself when you move houses and how much you gather in the space of about 60 years or so. I stayed in her new apartment by the marina, 5 minutes from the beach and 3 minutes from the main shopping street – my mum knows how to pick her favourite spots – so she chose wisely. And while I stayed by the marina for a week before her moving in, my mum was slaving over packing boxes in her old place, doing admin related to the move and so on. For a week I had no internet…
Personal Space
My reason for blogging started as a lesson in writing. I was a blogging virgin trying to find my way around some of the issues living with a chronic and degenerative illness brings. Soon I felt that writing could be more than just that; it would also be a lesson in creating a web page with backgrounds, pictures and widgets, something I had never really done before safe from creating and updating SharePoint pages at work. Therefore, while my mind was slowly becoming at ease about my illness because of the therapy writing seemed to be, my creativity became paramount because I found out that I actually could create something that others might like. Most bloggers would lie if we said we only want to write for ourselves. If that…
Forgiveness
Being diagnosed with a chronic illness often leads to self-examination of your mind. You think you made mistakes somewhere down the path of your life and now karma has come to bite you very hard. You want to know why this happened to you and ‘why not someone else who deserves it far more than I did’ and others will comfort you, saying that ‘bad things happen to good people…’ However, does it comfort you? What do you do? Do you really believe that you are a bad person because something bad happened to you? Do you feel the world now owes you because of this? Often existential questions go through my mind after issues arise and not just since my own MS diagnosis 8 years ago but ever since…
The road to diagnosis
It was a cold, dark February morning and once again, my eye and facial pain were back. The antibiotics my GP gave me the week before did not work at all, and he seemed clueless about what could be wrong with me. I had been on several rounds of antibiotics, I had seen a dentist, went to the Eye & Ear Clinic and I had seen a homoeopath, yet nobody was able to give me a clear answer. The only person somewhat clear on what was wrong with me said that I needed to have my immune and central nervous system checked out. Fast. She was an intuitive healer and turned out to be 100% correct. Go figure. On my way to work that morning, sitting next to a cold…
Relapse!
Yesterday I received an email from the Daily Post at WordPress that said ‘Competition: What activity, task, or game most brings out your competitive streak?’ Activity: having multiple sclerosis. Task: not going to bed when my body screams to should stop doing what I’m doing and make a triple Salchow backwards to land myself under my duvet instead. Game: enjoying life. Competitor: myself. It was an easy enough question to answer because I (still) consider myself my own worst competition, especially right now.