When my power chair and I hit 100, it felt like a significant milestone in the coming together of one soul and one motor. We'd bonded in those first 100 km, and I remember being sure that it was impossible for woman and machine to be any closer unless in a cyborg situation such as … Continue reading When 2 Become 1,000
Hell hath no fury like a woman with a full bladder and nowhere to empty it. Scrap that: hell hath no fury like a wheelchair-using woman waiting for someone to vacate the only accessible stall in a public washroom with plenty of unoccupied toilets. And can you blame her/them/me? It's hard enough to locate a … Continue reading Stalled
At the end of an especially frustrating day earlier this week, I found myself struggling to accept how little I’d accomplished. All afternoon, I’d flitted from one task to another, never able to spend more than fifteen minutes on any given thing before getting lost in the news or rolling to the kitchen for a … Continue reading (Un)burdened
I kind of hate the whole April Fool's Day thing. It left me on edge as a kid—would I wake up to find the classic plastic wrap over the toilet bowl, or would it be a booby-trapped-bedroom-door year?—and now, as an adult, I find little humour in the surge of joke-adjacent promotional emails that flood … Continue reading April, No Fool(ing)
Once again, Purple Day almost slipped by without my noticing it. I caught it in the nick of the time, though, and here's the blog post to prove it. This has become a pattern: every year for several in a row, I've only remembered just before or a little after the fact that I've failed … Continue reading I Almost Forgot It’s Purple Day, and I’m Totally Fine with That
It only occurred to me last night, a few days after the fact, that a two-year anniversary passed on March 7 (I think?) without my registering it. Two years and less than a week ago, I was discharged from the rehabilitation hospital and plopped back into real life. It’s now been two years, and I … Continue reading A Happily Missed Milestone
One of the few happy consequences of my recent confinement was that I had plenty of time to implement stage one of my training for a 10k I’ll participate in this coming May. To the unimaginative among you, it might seem strange that I committed to a race when I can’t walk to the corner, … Continue reading In Training
… I’m free! My inner drama queen had started to wonder if my period of confinement disproved that "this too shall pass" adage that rankles me when all I'm trying to do is see the glass half empty. Yesterday, for example, which was particularly bad from the “me cooped up and resentful that most people’s … Continue reading Twelve Days Later …
I check all the boxes for an ideal sucker for Duolingo, the glorious language "learning" app that feeds on my need to achieve all the things. Within an hour of waking each morning, I complete the three daily quests that Duo, the eerily dictatorial cartoon owl, has assigned me. I know exactly how long it's … Continue reading Streak Freeze
Last night just after 10:00 PM EST, I wheeled through the door, had a third dinner, unpacked because I'm constitutionally incapable of neglecting a bulging suitcase for more than thirty minutes, took a long bubble bath, then slept for eight hours straight, unheard of for me. I woke up disoriented in my own bed, half-expecting … Continue reading Same Same but Different
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 