By wendy, on February 2nd, 2012%
By Wendy Burnett
I hate the “court shows” that have taken over daytime TV, but I get stuck watching them on a regular basis because my husband likes them . . .
That disclaimer being made, Judge Judy happened to be on my TV the other day while I was getting ready for work. The case doesn’t really matter, it was just another group of folks making themselves look stupid until Judge Judy came out with something to the effect of:
“if he was able to go pick up money at Western Union, twice, he doesn’t sound very disabled to me!”
This is a perfect example of the total ignorance of what a disability IS, and the complete lack of understanding that people with disabilities face every day from the “healthy” population.
Does Judge Judy perhaps think that if we are not totally confined to our homes, we don’t qualify as disabled? Has she forgotten that even those among us who use a wheelchair, and therefore are VISIBLY dealing with some form of disability, are still able to leave our homes? Continue reading Judge Judy and (the Lack of) Disability Awareness »
By wendy, on January 20th, 2012%
 Image by blmiers2 via Flickr
By Wendy Burnett
When you have a chronic illness like fibromyalgia, every season has its challenges, but I think winter is the hardest to cope with. Not only is it cold, which tenses up muscles and increases pain levels; but there are so many other issues as well. Basically, winter with fibro sucks, and here are just a few of the reasons (if you have more, leave me a comment and I’ll add them):
- It’s cold, and frequently damp
- The weather changes all the time, which means barometric pressure changes and more aches and pains
- Shorter days and lower vitamin D levels that increase depression
- Being cooped up indoors without being able to open windows and doors increases exposure to indoor molds, toxins, and contagious illnesses; increasing allergic responses and physical stressors
- The weather makes exercising more difficult. Between higher pain levels and less ability to exercise outdoors or get to the gym we can slip into a vicious cycle of exercising less, which increases pain levels even more, and makes it even more difficult to exercise.
So how do we deal with all this “stuff” and keep our health from slipping? There are a ton of ways to minimize the winter “blahs,” but the most important one is: don’t give up! You may need to change some routines, but winter doesn’t have to be a miserable, depressing experience. I try to look at it as a challenge to my ingenuity, looking for new ways to get where I need to be and accomplish what I need (and want) to do.
Winter Survival Strategies:
Dealing with the cold (and damp): Layer, layer, layer! Several light layers of clothing, topped with a blanket; will keep you more comfortable than wearing one heavy item. Layering your clothes traps air between the layers and increases the amount of insulation they provide. If one pair of socks isn’t keeping your feet warm, add another light pair instead of taking off the ones you’re wearing and changing to a heavier pair.
If you’ve read much of this blog, you know how much I love hot packs . . . They’re even more wonderful in cold weather. Even if you don’t have a specific ache that needs heat (not likely, but it happens,) putting a hot pack in the chair or bed with you will help you stay warmer all over.
Flannel sheets are warmer than smooth cotton blends, and an electric blanket or mattress pad can make a huge difference in your ability to stay warm at night. They also provide gentle, all-over heat for the more general aches that tend to come with winter weather.
Shorter days and depression: Using full spectrum light bulbs will help, and so will adding a vitamin D supplement (low vitamin D increases depression, and with shorter, gloomier days our body doesn’t make enough.) Adding B vitamins can also help, either through supplements or more veggies.
Isolation is something else that can increase depression levels, and winter weather frequently keeps us at home. Finding online support through Twitter, Facebook, or forums can make a huge difference.
Being cooped up indoors: Adding a few potted plants will increase indoor air quality (if you have pets, make sure they’re safe if they get nibbled or keep them where your pets can’t munch them.) English ivy is an excellent plant for reducing indoor toxins, and it’s pretty easy to take care of too. There are many more options as well, and Treehugger has an excellent article on the subject, based on a NASA study on which plant is best for various pollutants.
To reduce the chances that I’ll catch something, I make sure I wash my hands regularly (with plain soap and water, antibacterials don’t help against viruses and increase the number of resistant bacteria,) get plenty of vitamin C and eat more onions and garlic. This last one is a bit controversial, because I also avoid vaccines like the plague. (The ONLY times in the last 15 years or so that my husband and I have actually had the flu were the two years we got a flu shot, and I’ve only gotten a cold once.)
Exercise: This is the toughest one for me because most of my exercise comes from walking to work, and in the winter that’s harder to do. If it’s too cold, or it’s raining, my husband and roommates make sure I have a ride, so I have to get a bit more creative. I’ll frequently do a couple of laps of the store I work at, or, on bad days, just get up and walk across the room a couple of times every hour or so. There are also videos on YouTube for fibromyalgia exercises that can be done while sitting down, which is especially helpful during flares because they’re very gentle and put less stress on your body.
By wendy, on November 24th, 2011%
 Ed Schipul via Flickr By Wendy Burnett
Day 13 – The Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge Prompts (#HAWMC) for today is “Open a book. Point to a page. Free write for 10-15 minutes on that word or passage. Post without editing if you can!” When I opened my book, the word I got was “acceptance,” so here goes.
The first step toward acceptance of a chronic illness is admitting that I’m powerless to make that illness go away, or to force my life back to the way it used to be. If I deny that I’m ill, or refuse to admit and adjust to my new limitations, I eliminate possibilities from my life.
This doesn’t mean that I’m powerless to make my life with illness better, or that I have to give up on being happy. Once I’ve admitted I can’t make it go away, and that my life is different; I can look for ways to reduce symptoms and find new ways to do the things I don’t want to give up.
Denial is a “stopper” though. Continue reading Accepting Chronic Illness – It’s NOT “Giving Up” »
By wendy, on November 24th, 2011%
 martha_chapa95 via Flickr By Wendy Burnett
It’s Thanksgiving, what are you thankful for?
Living with chronic illnesses can make it very difficult to find your gratitude sometimes, and we all struggle with that on a regular basis. One of the things you learn eventually is that there is always something to be grateful for . . .
By wendy, on November 24th, 2011%
 By NJR ZA (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons
By Wendy Burnett
It’s that time of the year again. Thanksgiving, Christmas, cooking, shopping, decorating, parties and other holiday activities can lead to over-doing things. Throw in the expectations (and demands) of family and friends and you get higher stress levels, too. Add it all together, and you get the perfect recipe for a serious flare, which can totally ruin your the season for you.
It doesn’t have to happen though. There are dozens of ways to cope with the holidays, and I’ve collected five posts and articles full of helpful tips for simplifying your celebrations, pacing yourself, and coping with the physical and emotional stresses of the season. Continue reading Top 5 Posts: How to Prevent Holiday Flares »
By wendy, on November 7th, 2011%
 Image by ParkerSav via Flickr
By Wendy Burnett
The Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge (#HAWMC) continues with the day 7 prompt: “Case of the Mondays. Write about something that gets you down, burns you out, or makes you sad. Purge it in a blog post. Turn it around at the end. Tell Tuesday why you’re ready for it.”
Mondays for me come more than once a week. Actually, I have a “Monday” anywhere from 3 to 6 days a week, because every day I have to go to work at the “awful place” is Monday.
If you haven’t already figured it out, I hate my job. I would literally prefer that someone shoot me than have to go into that place, but I’ve missed a grand total of one day in the last 18 months. I don’t have a choice, I have to work, or we don’t eat . . .
I work retail, part-time, because retail stores won’t hire full-time workers any more (and I couldn’t survive working full-time at the awful place anyway.) I spend my evenings standing on my feet slicing meat in a deli for anywhere from 4 to 8 hours at a stretch (usually after walking about a half mile to get there,) then walk home. 
I actually don’t mind waiting on customers and doing the cleaning when I close. Honestly, on the nights I actually have time to get all the stuff I’m supposed to do done, I enjoy the job. My customers are mostly nice, the regulars will come by and just kind of “hang out” for a few if I’m not busy; and the people I work with are pretty cool, too. Even my department manager is a sweetheart, and does all he can to not give me a schedule I can’t handle.
The issue is corporate, as usual. They demand more work than any THREE people could do in the amount of time they give us to do it in, then raise hell if it doesn’t get done. (I swear, I think it must be a requirement to get a lobotomy to be promoted to corporate. If it wasn’t, those people would have to know it’s not physically possible for one person to do what they expect.)
Let me give you an example. We’re allowed one person on duty at a time, and are expected to put out stock, wait on customers, make party trays, slice meat for the sub sandwiches another part of the department makes (on busy days, we go through about 40 pounds of ham and 60+ pounds of turkey, which all has to be sliced and weighed out into individual half-pound packets,) help out in bakery and making prepared food, put away deliveries and rotate stock, mark down things that are approaching the last day of sale, scan out outdated food, keep everything cleaned, set up new displays and reset all the stock every time they decide to move things around, and make sure we always have samples out.
We’re open 13 hours a day, and we’re allowed a total of 13 hours a day labor, so they expect us to also do all of the “closing” cleaning while we’re actually open. Now I don’t know about you, but I haven’t figured out how to be in two different places at the same time. Continue reading Moody Mondays – The Worst of It . . . »
By wendy, on November 6th, 2011%
 Image by bayareabaw via Flickr
By Wendy Burnett
Oh, well, looks like yesterday is going to have to be one of my “get out of post free” days. Between the pain levels and the Vicodin hangover (I don’t take that crap very often, so it can have some odd effects,) I slept until I had to get ready for work. I’ll probably make it up later though, because the prompt is pretty interesting.
The day 6 prompt for The Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge (#HAWMC) is “If I could do anything as a Health Activist… Get aspirational. Money is no longer an option. What is your biggest goal that is now possible? How could you get there? Now bring it back down to size. How much of this can you accomplish now, in a year, in five years?”
This is gonna be fun. I’ve been thinking about all the things I’d like to do if I had the money for a WHILE and a lot of it is just going to be writing it all down, so lets get started.
- First, I’d quit my job at the awful place so I could focus on my writing and research.
- I’d set up an actual office/studio space so I’d have somewhere I could do audios, videos, and decent pictures for my writing and get away from the constant interruptions while I’m trying to write.
- I’d start working on that TV show from day 2 of the challenge.
- I’d start the newsletter that’s been waiting for me to be able to afford the autoresponder for it, upgrade my hosting plan to provide more functionality for my site, upgrade my free accounts on places like HootSuite and Timely, get rid of all the annoying affiliate links on my site, and do some advertising.
- I’d do more experimentation and research on alternative treatments, and get certified as both an herbalist and an aromatherapist.
- I’d add resources to the website, like scheduled chats on various topics with someone actually there even if I had to pay them, beginner’s guides for the newly diagnosed, and whatever else we could come up with that would be helpful.
- Finally, I’d hire some other members of the chronic illness community to do things like find useful links and research, contribute content, and do graphics and website upgrades/maintenance. I know that there are thousands of people out of work, but I think that part of my responsibility as an activist is to help our OWN community first, and only go outside for services if I can’t find someone within the community to do what needs done.
I know from experience that with the flexibility to work from home, when symptoms allow, most of us are able to do a lot more than we think is possible. In addition, the opportunity to be productive and contribute something helps immensely with the emotional stresses of being sick all the time. It’s more complicated to have to manage multiple employees who need flexibility, rather than a single employee that can do the whole job; but that single employee has a chance at a traditional job, where the others have no hope of being hired by a company that only cares about getting the job done as cheaply as possible.
Now for part two . . . what CAN I do with the resources I have available? In the next year I can continue to add more content and develop resources for the community. I especially want to add at least one article on how to tell whether a “member” site for various illnesses is a genuine forum for helpful resources or a “shill” site sponsored by someone with something to sell. I can update my “links” pages, and I can go ahead and start the newsletter I want to do without the autoresponder.
In the next five years? I have no idea, other than more of the above. Most everything else requires money, and I have no way of knowing whether the financial situation will change enough to allow me to do any of those things.
This post was written as part of NHBPM – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J
By wendy, on November 3rd, 2011%
 Image via Wikipedia
By Wendy Burnett
The Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge Prompts (#HAWMC) for day two is to write about a TV show based on my life or blog . . . I LOVE this! My mind is going wild with ideas, but they’re all based on the same theme. The only real problem right now is a name. I have absolutely no idea what to call it, and I’m hoping that by the time I hit the end of the post I’ll have come up with something.
The format is dead easy, as soon as I read the prompt I knew I wanted something like a cross between Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil (without the confrontational pseudo-therapy.) The focus is living well in spite of having chronic illnesses and educating “normals” about the difficulties we face every day.
This gives me a huge range of possible guests; life coaches and psychologists, medical doctors that specialize in pain management and various chronic illnesses, massage therapists, herbalists, aromatherapists, acupuncturists, reflexologists, chiropractors, health activists, nutritionists, specialists in ergonomics and accessibility, lawyers that specialize in disability issues and patients with different issues and combinations of illnesses.
Not only that, but the combinations are endless. Panels of patients discussing how hard it is to get adequate pain relief or trying to find doctors that don’t treat them like addicts, debates between allopathic physicians and holistic physicians, massage therapists and aromatherapists discussing how their specialties can be combined, discussions between pain management doctors who believe that opiods are a necessary tool and doctors who refuse to prescribe pain medications at all, etc., etc., etc.
So many possibilities, so many topics . . .
This post was written as part of NHBPM – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J
By wendy, on November 2nd, 2011%
What do you pay attention to in your life? Is it the 5 people who say, “I hope your pain levels drop soon,” or the one who makes a nasty comment like, “fibromyalgia doesn’t exist, you just don’t want to have to work like the rest of us?” (Yes, I’ve actually had someone say that to me.)
I’m going to tell you something you already know, and you’re likely to think I’m sort of nuts until you read a little further.
You can only see the things you look at.
Yes, it sounds stupidly obvious, of course if you don’t look at it you can’t see it, but there’s a point to this statement that is directly related to living as well as possible with your chronic illnesses. It took me a LOT of years to make the connection (I’m a little slow,) and I’m hoping I can help you catch on a little quicker than I did. Continue reading Where is Your Attention Focused?: Positive Thinking for the Chronically Ill »
By wendy, on October 30th, 2011%
 Credit: Free images from acobox.com
By Wendy Burnett
When I was in therapy, my therapist used to tell me I was comparing my “insides” to everyone else’s “outsides.” (Thanks Ginny, it took me a while, but I finally get it.) Intellectually, I understood what she was saying, but I never really “felt” it until recently.
What gave me the push I needed was one day when I was still working fast food. One of the people I was working with said she envied me and wished she had a life like mine . . . My immediate thought was, “darlin, if you knew what my life is really like, you wouldn’t want it.” That’s when it really connected for me.
She only saw what I let her see, the cheerful, funny me with the great friends and strong marriage. Continue reading Are You Comparing Your Insides to Everyone Else’s Outsides? »
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"The moral test of a society is how that society treats those who are in the dawn of life . . . the children; those who are in the twilight of life . . . the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life . . . the sick, the needy, and the handicapped."
---Hubert Humphrey
Welcome to the new home of Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired. I hope you'll enjoy the changes, and the new resources I'll be adding as I have time to work on the site. Things will look a bit odd while I learn where and how to modify the appearance, so please bear with me.
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