I want everyone to be very, very clear that what is being described here is a blanket and systematic discrimination against disabled people in Canada receiving *any non-emergent healthcare.*
This is why it actively hurts me to see people claim that it is easier to access care here.
I. Have. No. Ongoing. Healthcare.
None.
I am alive right now because I have a background in pathobiology and design which afforded me the expertise to read and analyze clinical literature, and the confidence to realize that if the healthcare system was content to let me die, I needed to find a way to save my own life.
FUCK Canadian healthcare.
(And to be really clear about what the consequences are of doctors systematically discriminating against disabled patients through Care Connect, here’s some context. That + year waitlist in my region? THAT’s Care Connect.)
This is not a situation where it’s, “fuck, this clinic has rejected me, I need to keep searching and my options are narrowing.” (Which FOR THe RECORD is also very bad.)
There is no search.
There is one, years-long waitlist, and you eventually get to the top...
...and then eventually someone has an opening and then *they* get too decide whether you’re too big of a burden to be worth that measly $220k a year they’re pulling in. /s
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I feel like most people assume that my hatred of medicine comes from my experiences as a patient.
But nah, most of it actually comes from the years I spent inside that culture.
Like just on the basis of my experiences as a patient I’ve obviously got a good, solid baseline level of rage.
But it’s knowing how doctors talk about their patients to other “insiders,” how medical students are trained to think about their patients, and what qualities are selected for by the systems that train them that keep me from thinking the clinic is redeemable.
They asked if there was anything else I thought they should know about 😃
The cool thing about receiving absolutely no goddamn healthcare is that I no longer give a flying fuck what they think of me as a patient because what exactly are they gonna do, give me less than zero care somehow??
It resembles Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, which is a common and well-known phenomenon, in that it's highly localized, and involves aching and loss of muscle strength in a particular muscle group, about 24-48 hours after exercising that muscle group.
What I've never been sure about is whether the magnitude of what I experience is "normal."
Because all resources on DOMS are just like "hurting's normal but if it hurts too much you're working too hard and it shouldn't like...immobilize you or anything."
For #TransDayOfVisibility, I want to talk a little about medical transitioning with medical trauma.
I've got medical PTSD from a whole slew of stuff, ranging from medical assault to literally 3 decades of gaslighting me about my embodied reality...
...so for a long time, I didn't even consider medical transition because I didn't feel comfortable allowing medical professionals to get their grimy little violent hands anywhere near my gender.
But over the past year, as my mental health has healed slightly, and I've watched trans friends and acquaintances begin their medical transitions, it was something I became more interested in.
So at the start of January, I called the local gender clinic to make an appointment.
We’re doing social model discourse tonight so here’s some stuff to know:
a) the social model, as originally formulated, explicitly defined disability as the oppression that is experienced by those whose bodies/minds are *perceived* as deviant...
...which, intentionally or not, leaves out a lot of disabled people. While there have been attempts to rehabilitate the model to address the experiences of those with chronic pain, as far as I have been able to find, there has been no attempt to comprehensively resolve...
...the problem that medically invisible disability poses to the model’s assumptions, or to contend with the impact that those assumptions have had on the advocacy and policy shaped by the social model.
Winter’s awesome because literally every time I walk the dog I end up wanting to cry out of exasperation and pain because everything is so goddamn inaccessible #NEISvoid
I just got stuck on a patch of black ice for about five minutes because these assholes who can afford a $500,000 house apparently can’t afford a snow shovel and sand.
Then I got stuck at an intersection because the pedestrian button stops working in subzero temps and the lights won’t change at night without it. So I had to cross the other way and jump a curb cut that’s hazardous when it’s not covered in snow, to try the opposite button.