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Stop and think: invisible access for invisible disabilities

By Lauredhel @Hoyden - posted Wednesday, 16 January 2008


This is my first personal post about being sick. A “coming-out”, to some of my online friends. And a whole lot of elaboration, for those who know I’m sick, but don’t know the details. It’s taken me ages to write, and I haven’t re-drafted it: here are my musings, in the raw.

Becoming sick

I have moderately severe chronic fatigue syndrome, or something that looks very much like it. I first got sick two and a half years ago, quite suddenly. After a few months of feeling just a bit off, not bouncing back with my self-prescribed generic good-food-and-fun-and-exercise cure for tiredness, I suddenly crashed.

Over the course of about two weeks, I crashed hard. I became unable to work, and daily living was full of what suddenly seemed to be insurmountable obstacles. I dropped things, felt off balance, walked into things, had large-muscle twitches, thermoregulation problems, I was suddenly blanketed in pain. My short-term memory came and went and I couldn’t concentrate on more than one thing at once, a huge change in cognitive function for me.

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Most noticeably, activity didn’t pick me up like it always had in the past. Before, if I felt a little off I could go for a bike ride or a swim or a choir rehearsal or a night out dancing, and feel invigorated by it. After, I’d walk a couple of blocks then flump down absolutely exhausted. This was the first time I’d ever felt like this, and it didn’t make any sense! I felt happy enough, apart from being terrified that there was something awful wrong with me (lupus and MS were high on the differential at the time); there were no clinical signs of depression or somatisation.

This didn’t stop the first specialist I went to, a neurologist, insisting that I must, must, must be depressed, of course. I was a woman. With a toddler. Of course I was depressed! Just deluded and in denial, as hysterical women so often are. The abnormal blood tests and lack of clinical signs didn’t register in this simple equation: ovaries + fatigue = probably depression. Ovaries + fatigue + motherhood = certain depression.

Thankfully, I got past that, though not without a fair bit of righteous annoyance on my part. Depression would have been just fine by me as a diagnosis. I know how depression is treated. I know it can be managed, if not cured. I don’t feel a stigma about it; let’s face it, many, perhaps even most, of my close friends have had depression. But it’s a positive diagnosis, not a wastebasket one. Lesson one: no clinical signs of depression means no depression, people.

I found a GP with a clue, and stuck with her, so happily I’m not without competent, non-judgmental medical care. Sadly, not all people with CFS are in that position.

Discovering spoon theory

I first learned about spoon theory when I was poking around reading up about lupus. Christine Miserandino, a person with lupus, was trying to answer a question by her friend. The friend had asked her what it was like being sick - not about her symptoms, but about what it was like being her. Stuck for a metaphor, Christine grabbed all the spoons off the table, and explained that every day, she had a very limited number of spoons, unlike a healthy person who has a near-unlimited spoon supply. Each spoon stood for one chunk of activity. The friend started out with 12 spoons, and had to run through a day, giving up one spoon for every thing she did: including getting up, dressing, showering, and so on. The friend was down to half her spoons before she’d got to work in the morning - and the light dawned. It dawned for me, too.

Every day, every moment, is a trade off. Every piece of activity has to be a conscious choice. “Normals” never have to choose between cooking and cleaning up, between showering and playing with their kid. Never have to think ahead to the weekend, and say “I’m having lunch with a friend on Saturday, so I have to keep Sunday completely free to recover”. Spoons are always my first thought when planning out my life.

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An example: today I changed the bedding. That’s a fair chunk of spoons. I started planning it a couple of days ago, when I knew the bedsheets had to be changed. I have learned from experience that on a bedsheet-changing day, I’m not going to be able to get much other vertical time once essentials are accounted for (personal grooming, lunch, picking my kid up from school). I figured Friday would be a good day. We could have our weekly takeaway dinner, so I’d be able to steal the cooking spoons. And Friday night is Movie Night for the lad, so our evening will consist of hanging around on the bed, watching something with dinosaurs and munching popcorn, a low-spoon activity. I also checked forward to our Saturday plans: no excursions, so I can use up all my spoons on Friday instead of keeping some in reserve.

So I planned a couple of days in advance; I just changed the sheets; and now I’m horizontal. And wondering, just a little, how I’m going to get the energy to do school pickup today - maybe I’ll drive the block to school to save those couple of spoons for tonight? I’m not sure yet.

I used to spontaneously say “Oh, I’ll just quickly change the sheets now”, somewhere between getting home from work and going out for a night on the town. No more. Life has changed. It’s taken me two and a half years of being sick to get to this point of juggling my spoons relatively effectively. As recently as six or eight months ago, I was still on the push-crash roller-coaster, using up all my energy on one activity without thinking forward to the next, and spending days on end crashed out from not pacing thoughtfully.

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First published at Hoyden about Town on May 4, 2007. Also see: "Rearranging accessibility: more on invisible disability accommodations".



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About the Author

Lauredhel is an eclectically-educated mum from the west. She blogs about feminism, politics, language, scepticism, and life at Hoyden About Town.

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Rearranging accessibility: more on invisible disability accommodations

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