Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

After I came home from yesterday's work trip -- going in to town after dark (so, 5pm) to look at a streetlight -- I realized I probably don't need my heavy awkward white cane tailored for hiking off-road trials for everyday use any more.

My ankle feels fine almost all the time now and doesn't need the kind of support I was using it for these last nine months.

I put it away with the others (I have four or five canes now, for reasons), swapped it for the fanciest one to celebrate the milestone.

(The fanciest one is the "no jab" cane, which has a big spring inside so when you run into some uneven pavement or some other obstacle, it doesn't wrench your wrist or jab you in the belly (bruises are common among new long cane users...and probably old ones too). It has a fancy red leather handle too, (probably to help justify its cost!).

And last night I added some rainbow tape to it -- only the bottom segment so far; I like a lot of white on my white canes but also I like the idea of making it look more queer.

I used it on today's work trip -- to Liverpool and back -- and it was fine.

Despite missing circuits (slightly snotty, thought it unlikely I had germs but wanted to keep them home if I did), weightlifting (wasn't on) and swimming (I was Garysitting) last week, my ankle feels okay after circuits tonight!

And that's despite doing spider lunges and mountain climbers (which I do now, very slowly) back-to-back in the warm up, which left me wanting to go home after just that, haha.

My arms and legs are sore, but my ankle feels so normal that I'm a bit suspicious frankly!

The trainer noticed it too, they said my lunges are getting really good and I happily agreed. "On that foot!" I said about the one they'd just seen me do. "The other foot is the weak one..."

Still, we agreed that both are noticeably better. "Only taken me a year," I couldn't help but gripe.

"But you're here now!" they said.

"I'm here now," I had to agree, and smiled.

D woke up this morning with sinus pain and throat pain. He had a negative LFT this morning and another one tonight though.

Being so conscientious about avoiding covid has meant we've had very little illness of any kind though, so it made for an unsettled evening. He was looking his worst when I got home from Leeds (this away day could've been a productive one-hour workshop on Teams) at 6pm. He's still sleeping on his own on the day bed tonight though: even if he doesn't need to quarantine himself, it's often nicer to sleep by yourself when you're sick. I was happy to make up the bed for him and reassemble the things that were last like that when I was recovering from the broken ankle: the little table for your book or water bottle, he can put his laptop on it to watch movies; the lamp we bought for me in this situation which has since been repurpose went back to its original location.

Even making the bed for him reminded me of this time almost a year ago -- the impending traumaversaries of the next month or so were the topic of my counseling session yesterday, so it's been more to the forefront of my mind anyway (and my ankle was annoyingly painful at lunchtime today, in a way it hasn't been for months).

I made the bed again reminding myself of how different this situation was. It's okay if I'm sad or shaken by the similarities, but I'm relieved that they're dwarfed by the differences.

( Read more... )

After work, D and I biked to the vet to pick up Gary's meds.

It's the first time I'd been further than a pub that's handily nearby and connected to an off-road path for us. The vet is actually on the same path which made this a feasible next step for me and my ankle recovery after we've made a couple trips to that pub so far this late spring/early summer. I think the pub is about a mile away, the vet is about two.

And since the pub is on the way, we stopped on the way back and had a couple of drinks. I had a pale ale I actually liked! D had an alcohol-free beer that seemed as good as any alcoholic one.

On a day when I've been trying to articulate all the problems my ankle has caused me for the purpose of the PIP review, it was a relief that my ankle has mostly behaved itself and let me do a bike ride without much consequence. It's a little twinge-y now at bedtime, but lately it's been worse on days when I've done less!

I'm finding the PIP/ankle stuff really difficult on my mental health. I'm not going into huge amounts of detail and I'm not expecting any more points from it. But I'll be damned if I'm not going to answer their questions fully. It has had a big effect on my mobility and a compounding effect on my pre-existing disabilities.

Also even my testosterone is a new medication since the last time I did the form, so I've gotten to talk about that too, heh.

Holy shit I actually got to see an aurora last night!

diffrentcolours drove us (and friends!) out to the middle of nowhere and I got out of the car thinking I wonder what I'll see....if anything and it was actually amazing. I am surprised I didn't cry.

What we saw didn't look like most of the photos I've seen: I was expecting green or purple sheets coming up from the horizon and what we saw was a band stretching l across the sky, with twisty dancing shapes almost straight up over our heads, like the jewel in a ring.

The shapes changed more quickly than I expected! What first looked like a pinch in a fabric seam was soon the Firebird logo, then something I first called a comet but quickly decided was a jellyfish... It was like looking at clouds and finding patterns in them, only better and more eerie.

One of the first shapes I saw was a bat. So that was good.

I have only these words, no photos: my phone camera just showed a black square when I pointed it at the sky. I know a lot of people had better results with their phone cameras than their eyes but this was maybe the first time my camera couldn't see a lot better than I can!

I was in bed at 1.59am, which isn't quite unprecedented for me but it is about five hours later than I've been going to bed lately. As a chronic insomniac specializing in sleep-maintenance insomnia, I'm used to waking up soon after that! I wouldn't care but I've signed up for my gym class tomorrow morning. But I thought that if in the morning I had to sleepily text the trainer and explain that I couldn't make it because I was up half the night looking at aurora, they'd probably be nice about it.

I didn't have to do that though. Despite waking up about eight minutes before I would ideally be ready to go, and D being mostly-asleep still, we did make it.

We got home, I had a shower, had lunch, then I wanted to mow the lawn because again it desperately needed it and it hasn't even been raining the last few days. It's properly warm today though; I caught the sun a little and I was so sweaty afterward that I'd already undone all the good work that the shower had accomplished.

But I had nice iced tea that I'd finally remembered to make yesterday. Green tea with spearmint, it's so tasty and refreshing.

It ended up being a busy day. The other two went to B&M while I dozed on the sofa, and then D and I went for a bike ride just in time to miss the official Cycle Fest, but there was still loud music and nice weather and food and drinks and lots of people, lots of little kids and dogs to smile at.

It's a short bike ride but on top of gym and lawn mowing which were both hard on my ankle, it was all the biking I'd be happy about doing anyway. I'm delighted at how much I've been able to do today though.

No Eurovision in this household tonight, which feels weird but I feel sick at the thought of pretending everything's okay in Gaza when it's not. So instead I finished a library book this evening (The Divorce Colony) and I think it's been months since I could say that!

( So I'll put this behind a cut. )

I saw this post, by a disability rights lawyer, talking about extending accessibility features to more people who've aged into disability and who don't think that they're disabled or that accessibility menus are for them, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

I love that it includes good questions, answers, and good strategies to get more accessibility into the hands of more older people, and they sound like good ones. I think it was silveradept who I saw muse on how older people benefit most from learning about new/unfamiliar tech things through sources they trust and consider authoritative, and I love to see that reflected in these strategies, where the sources might be AARP, phone store staff, or their loved ones who found out about this via TikTok.

This topic also has me thinking that another way to address people not knowing about things that may become relevant to their changing bodies as they age is to address ableism as far and wide in society as possible.

The writer asks her dad great questions, like does he consider himself deaf (no), a person with a disability (no), disabled (no), or hard of hearing (yes). And there can be lots of reasons why someone who watches TV with no sounds at all, captions only, says he doesn't have a disability and he's only aware of accessibility because it's relevant to his daughter's livelihood. I wouldn't speculate on a specific stranger's reason for not thinking of themself as disabled, but one of those possible reasons is internalized ableism. Just ambient, systemic ableism that we all (including people who do identify as disabled!) can be affected by. Heretofore-able-bodied people have decades of thinking of disability as Other. Quite a lot of decades, in the case of an elder who's only recently acquired an impairment in something they'd previously not been impaired by. It can take a real paradigm shift for someone to start thinking of themselves as something that's been distant and by overwhelming consensus worse than their previous identity.

Of course I'm thinking of my own parents too. My dad just had surgery to repair a torn meniscus. Before he knew that this is what was causing his pain, he hoped he could "just get a cortisone shot and go back to normal." Didn't know the word ibuprofen (literally he struggled to pronounce it, and that's a whole week after I suggested it to him!). My mom said after the operation he walked with a walker only for "a few days."

She's no better: the very first thing she told me about his surgery on Skype today was to grumble "not that you'd know it" after mentioning that it had happened earlier this week. She resents him for getting better quicker than she was after a broken ankle a few years ago. My parents are both desperate to not think of themselves as disabled even temporarily.

Meanwhile here I am, taking advantage of every ambient mobility aid or adaptation available in my household in the wake of my broken ankle, whether technical (grab rails, waking cane, shower chair) or social (we've all agreed that until further notice I have dibs on the spot in the living room where I can sit with my foot elevated all the time).

But I grew up thinking the same way as my parents. It's the disabled friends I started to make only in early adulthood that taught me a better culture is possible. One where we work on ridding ourselves of shame and of the veneration of individualism. One where we recognize that everyone is interdependent, there's never been only one right way to succeed and that success isn't going to look the same for everyone anyway, that there's as many ways to live a fulfilled life as there are people.

I think younger disabled people can play a big role in helping older people can learn about the benefits of this kind of culture as well.

And devs can learn it too, to go back to the iPhone example. Maybe the 29 accessibility options don't only have to exist in their own special section. The article writer's dad was never going to look at a menu on his phone called "accessibility," even though there was an option there that makes his life better every day. A lot of people benefit from, say, larger text or live captions or reduced animation who never think of themselves as disabled or these as accessibility options. They can also be just "options," other ways for the display or the notification sounds or whatever to behave. (While also staying in the accessibility menu ideally, because that's where many people are used to finding them, and also it can be way more accessible to go "okay, here's the 'vision' section, that's what's going to be relevant to me" rather than having to wade through screenfuls of irrelevant-to-me bells and whistles in the display options to find "high contrast mode" or whatever.)

It's a tricky balance, between disability pride and wider awareness, a tension I feel in all my thinking about how I as a disabled person interact with an ableist world. Being "integrated" or "mainstreamed" isn't good because it makes my access needs less shameful by being more "normal." Numbers don't legitimize them; they'd be just as important if it were only me who needed magnification and good color contrast and no animations. But it's not just me, so it's good to put such options in front of as many as possible or the people who would benefit from them.

I asked diffrentcolours if he could give me a lift to my hospital appointment today. He's been to most of them with me, so I said I am conscious of how much work he has to do at the moment and it's fine if he doesn't want to hang around this time, I am happy to get the bus home, it'd just be helpful if he could get me there because it's a lot quicker than getting the bus.

He asked if this was the fracture clinic or physio (one was today and one's tomorrow), and when I said physio he said "So if I go along I get to see Becky?!"

We both really like my physio.

And this is probably the last time I got to see her! (D couldn't join me after all, but I did tell Becky when she commented on me being on my own this time that D had wanted to skip work to see her, which she did seemed charmed by). We expected this to be my last appointment and she was happy with my reports of how the last month has gone, including all the walking around Brussels (Pokémon Go told D that he walked like six times more that week than he usually does, so I would've as well).

When she heard about what I'm still having trouble with she added one new exercise, but mostly I'm just supposed to keep up with the ones I was (supposed to be) doing, keep weaning myself off the walking stick so I can use my white cane more again, all the stuff I was told last time. Just keep going. I'm right where I should be for 3-6 months into recovery, she said, and it's been just over three months.

I had my second physio appointment today. (An online chum of mine who lives in Germany recently broke their ankle in what sounds like a similar way: they dislocated and broke it, needed metalwork. But they had their operation that same day (well, late at night I guess) and was seen by a physio a few times while they were in the hospital afterwards and then it's been two or three times a week at their home! Imagine!)

I'd been doing my exercises pretty faithfully, forgetting a day or two (which the physio assured me is no big deal) but otherwise keeping at them. I found them easy and they didn't cause pain or fatigue so I didn't mind them at all.

The physio was really happy with how I was doing. Everything from just watching me walk into her little cubicle at the beginning of the appointment, to my range of motion when she checked that: it was exactly the same in both feet today. Again my left ankle is still a little weaker but only to the extent that's inevitable.

So I've got new exercises to do, and I tried a stationary bike which left me sad I don't have regular access to one because it felt really good on my ankle. I can do bodyweight lunges and squats and stuff at the gym as long as I "tolerate it" (i.e. it doesn't hurt), which is exciting because I'm going back to what we're now calling "trans gym" tomorrow. I confessed I did a little of that last week, just trying out like if my ankle would hold up for a plank or whatever, but the physio said she was fine with me trying that stuff and doing it if it felt okay. Indeed, one of my new exercises is just lunges because they move your ankle all around.

With how well I'm progressing and the fact that we're away in two weeks, I won't go back for a month. And that might be my discharge appointment.