Deliberately stressing me out is, at this point, assault.

That’s how I see it anyway.  I don’t mean disagreeing with me.  Anyone who wants to disagree with me can disagree with me as much as they want to.  I’m talking about personal attacks, and you people know who you are by now.

I have severe adrenal insufficiency.  For those who don’t know what that means, it means that my body is not making cortisol.  I have to replace all of my cortisol with a steroid called dexamethasone, and I will be on dexamethasone for the rest of my life.

Cortisol is one of the hormones that is called a stress hormone, meaning it gets used when you are under physical or emotional stress.  This means that people with adrenal insufficiency have to be extremely careful when our bodies or emotions are under extra stress.

For instance, I recently had aspiration pneumonia requiring antibiotics.  This means I had to triple my dose of dexamethasone to avoid what’s called an adrenal crisis (click through to Wikipedia if you want the details).  Adrenal crisis is how people with adrenal insufficiency tend to die.

It’s not just physical stress that can cause an adrenal crisis, however.  It’s also emotional stress.  Wikipedia’s commentary on prevention of adrenal crisis is, I quote:

Adrenal crisis is triggered by stress and hence people with adrenal insufficiency need to avoid stressful situations.

That’s very important for managing adrenal insufficiency.

I recently found out that my father is dying of cancer.  We don’t know how long he has.  It has metastasized into several organs to the point where they haven’t been able to trace it back to wherever it originated.

My mother, his only caretaker, has a more severe form of a neuromuscular junction disorder (probably myasthenia gravis) that I also have.  She has to not only take care of him, but do all the jobs around the house that he used to do.  Before all this started, she had a myasthenia crisis and almost died in the ICU when she stopped breathing earlier this year.  Doctors have warned her that she’s not able to handle this and that she needs to move closer to a hospital.

My parents recently had to temporarily evacuate their home due to a forest fire that went right past it.

My grandmother has been slowing down and in poor health, but in a vague enough way they don’t really know what’s going on.  She says she’s willing to take antibiotics, but draws the line at invasive treatments like surgery, if they figure out what’s going on.  She says she’s led a good long life and she’s at peace with death.

I am under more stress right now than I have ever been in my life.  I have to consistently take a higher dose of dexamethasone than normal, just to be able to minimally function.  My endocrinologist says I’m doing the exact right thing.  But taking the extra dexamethasone doesn’t magically make the stress or its effects and dangers disappear, it just makes you safer.

I reserve the right to delete whatever posts I want for whatever reasons I want.

I reserve the right not to explain to you why I’m deleting your posts.

I reserve the right not to owe any of you an explanation for anything I do on this blog, or in my life in general.

And if you come here deliberately trying to antagonize me — and you know who you are, because you’ve been doing it for years — I will treat it the same as if you walked up and tried to start a fistfight.  Because right now, more than ever, any stress can have a catastrophic effect on my health.  Adrenal insufficiency is the worst disease to combine with stress, and myasthenia gravis doesn’t help either, especially now that I’m going on Cellcept (an immune-suppressing drug).  And don’t try to tell me these diseases aren’t real, my doctors who in both cases did the labwork personally, will laugh in your face. And to be abundantly clear it’s adrenal insufficiency (i.e. they could not find cortisol in my blood at all), not adrenal fatigue (i.e. a condition used by quacks to blame literally any symptom on, regardless of your actual hormone levels, which then puts you in danger because you’re not getting treatment for whatever the real disease is).

So if you disagree with me, disagree with me.

But if you’re here to antagonize, to bully, to start fights, with a chip on your shoulder, to threaten me, to accuse me of not really being disabled, to deliberately trigger my PTSD, and all the other things that stalkers and trolls like to do for fun?  Fuck off back where you came from and never bother me again.  And understand that if I actually enter an adrenal crisis because of stress you caused, then you are partially responsible for what happened.  I guarantee you the adrenal insufficiency is 100% the real deal, no matter what you think.  And people who know me will view you as responsible.  If you have enough of a conscience to care about things like that, then think about it before you pick fights with me for fun.  I have enough going on right now without that.  Have some basic human decency for once.

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How to solve “behavior problems” without having to learn self-control.

Many years ago, meetings with my case manager tended to involve shouting and cussing. Mainly on my end. Today, our biggest problem during meetings is whether I'm physically and cognitively capable of holding a serious conversation at that time during the day. I would love to take credit for this by saying I learned a lot of self-control between then and now. But I suspect that even if I have, that's not what really changed things.

Like a lot of cognitively disabled people, I am not capable of keeping track of the dozens of things that have to happen for my basic needs to be met. And I really mean basic: Food, water, clothing, bills, hygiene, shopping, and medical care. Unlike a lot of states, the DD agency here only serves cognitively disabled people — you have to have an intellectual disability or autism, cerebral palsy doesn't count. So you would think they'd require case managers to be organized enough to meet those needs. You would think, but you would think wrong.

My case manager back then was a nice enough guy on a purely social level, but he was not an organized person. At all. So he was able to do a few things, but other than that he gave staff very little direction on how to consistently do what I needed. Meanwhile I was unable to even know most of what needed to happen. So stuff. Very necessary stuff. Lots of it. Wasn't getting done.

This meant that I pretty much lived from crisis to crisis, discovering a different gaping hole in my care each week. My case manager, having lots of power and being unwilling to face his role in these matters, kept telling me that these things were not his problem.

The more time went on, the worse things got, and the less he was willing to take responsibility for what was happening. So he blamed me. Nobody could possibly keep track of this many medical problems and appointments at once. I was unreasonable to expect basic care. There was no possible way to meet the needs of someone like me. I was the problem.

I kind of wanted to survive. So the more time went on, the more often I chewed him out for not doing his job. And the more frustrated I got, the more he treated me as if I was the one doing something wrong. Because hurting his feelings was worse than him forcing me to live in perpetual crisis mode. And it was perfectly reasonable to simply deny I had needs rather than work to meet them, right?

Towards the end, he began to get snippy and snarky. If I brought up anything he wasn't doing, he'd get this twisted smile in his voice and say, “Well maybe your new case manager will be able to do this.” Even I could pick up the implied meaning: that it was unreasonable and demanding of me to expect anyone to do these things, and I would soon find this out when I got a new case manager who would be just as incapable of keeping track of these things as he was. Then I would be forced to admit how impossible it was to meet my needs.

Except it didn't work out like that. At all.

My new case manager was a young woman. She was organized and efficient. And within a month or so, she completely turned my life around. I could finally rest, because I no longer had to keep a constant lookout for things going wrong.

And my reputation changed. Suddenly they considered me reasonable, polite, and civil. They acted as if I was the one who had changed. But I wasn't. What changed was my situation. It's hard to be nice — hell, literally fatal to be nice — when it's your life on the line, when there's a different crisis or three every week.

Yet that's exactly the position a lot of agencies force disabled people into. They don't provide adequate case management, and the outcome becomes our fault. We are forced to fight for basic necessities. When we do fight, they take that as evidence that we are capable of keeping track of our own needs without any extra assistance. We become not their problem.

From what I've seen, a lot of disabled people die this way. With help from friends, I've been able to catch situations like that. But not all the time, and not before the situation becomes dire. The amount of emergency room visits I used to have due to dehydration alone is astonishing compared to what I have today. It used to be routine for me to get fluids in an IV on a regular basis, because nobody was helping me drink water or Gatorade.

So the situation becomes this: If we don't speak up, they presume everything is okay, because if it weren't, someone would say something, right? If we do speak up, they presume everything is okay, because speaking up proves we are competent to track these things and direct support staff on our own. Plus,if we spoke up in one instance, then our failure (inability) to speak up in other instances means nothing's really wrong, because if it were, we'd say something. “You're such a good self-advocate,” they say, when they really mean “If there was another problem, you'd say it.” If we routinely end up in severe medical trouble, that's only to be expected given how many medical problems people like us have.

Needless to say, my being alive at the moment owes a lot to coincidence.

They also take signs of desperation as just happening, with no context attached. So our justified terror and anger become behavior problems, or psychiatric disorders. Or it's just part of who we are to be demanding or nasty. I'm still not certain my agency perceives the change in my behavior as a response to a change in context. They probably think I mysteriously learned self-control, or finally matured past being demanding.

No. My needs got met. That's a huge difference between that, and some kind of change on my part. If they went back to screwing me over and blaming me for the consequences, I'd probably go back to yelling at them.

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Communication page I used to handle that invasive woman I met.

It’s been quite some time since I posted my letter to the woman who accosted me on my way to the para transit van. But I wanted to update people on how I handled the situation when she approached me the next day. Which was a success.

I knew that I have trouble coming up with new language of any kind in high stress situations, especially involving people with bad boundaries. So I spent most of the night creating a new page for my communication software.

I use Proloquo or Proloquo2Go for most of my communication these days. My super-expensive, clunky Dynavox has been collecting dust in a corner ever since I first got Proloquo2Go years ago. Proloquo2Go has two separate sections. One where you type and it speaks out loud. Another where you can say something by pressing on one or more pictures.

I created a page where everything was about boundaries in one way or another. These are things I’m often unable to say in real time. I have a hard time remembering its possible to say these things. And coming up with words. And monitoring my emotions in response to situations. And communicating around invasive people. And pushing words past what feels like a barrier between my mind and everything else. Let alone all this and more at once.

Here’s the page I created:

[Description: A communication page arranged as a grid with one sentence per square. Each one has one word or sentence. Words in parentheses are what the previous sentence is an abbreviation for: Back off. Don’t patronize… (Don’t patronize me.) Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t want talk about. (I don’t want to talk about it.) Fuck off. Get out of my face. Go away. I am not a child. I don’t care. I don’t do eye contact. I’m not kidding. I’ve a right to be mad. (I have a right to be mad.) it’s not funny. Leave me alone. Now. Please. Stay away from me. Stop it right now. Stop. That hurts my brain. You put me in danger. (You’re putting me in danger.) you’re hurting me. You’re too close to me.]

I tried to make it so that I could use various levels of politeness, forcefulness, and rudeness depending on the situation. One way I did this was with different icons. Obviously, “leave me alone” and “fuck off” are very different. But another way I did it was by adding icons for “please” and “now”, the two squares outlined in blue. This made it so, by hitting two buttons in a row, I could say “please leave me alone” or “leave me alone now”. So I have a pretty good variety of intensity I can use.

I was expecting her the next day. She had said she wanted to meet me in the morning. So I prepared myself. I tried to stay connected and aware of my surroundings. She sat down at the table next to me. And she watched until my staff person had to leave me alone for a minute. Then she approached.

Because I was expecting her, I was prepared for the onslaught people like her carry with them. That thing where when they get close to you, it almost feels as if they are overlapping with you. So in my head I made sure to mentally separate us, which made it easier to communicate. I hit “please” and “stay away from me”. She yammered some sort of explanation and went back to her table.

I maintained deliberate mental distance the rest of the morning that I was anywhere near her. My case manager later made an effort to find her. She’d heard the story from a guy who witnessed it, and she wanted to report this woman. But we never found her. And things went just fine the rest of the day.

In any alternate universes where I didn’t make this communication page, the likely outcome is much worse. I would have been pretty much trapped around this woman, and that would have done a kind of emotional damage that takes time to recover from. It’s nothing that has any kind of official name, it just leaves me more vulnerable to other people like her until I can reverse it.

Another important thing I did besides create the communication page, was to rehearse everything many times beforehand. If I don’t do something like this, it’s hard to use the communication icons. Contrary to popular belief, just having the ability to type or use icons, doesn’t solve every communication problem.

And without rehearsing, there’s a big chance I’ll never use a page like this. My fingers won’t know where to go. My mind won’t remember it’s possible. My eyes won’t remember to look through the page to find possible things to say. My will won’t be able to push through the barrier between experience and expression. And much more. That’s a lot of places for communication to break down.

It is absolutely vital that people who use communication devices, have ways to respond to violations of our basic boundaries. Disabled people are far more likely than others to have others behave invasively with us, ranging from subtle to violent. People teach us from our earliest years onward that such invasion is normal, natural, and something we should accept without complaint. We have to have the means to say no.

And we have to have the means to say no forcefully, even rudely. We need to be able to use cuss words, even if we have the kind of personality that would never use them. Sometimes the only reason that we appear unnaturally even-tempered is because we’ve never been allowed to be otherwise. We have the right to say fuck off, but people don’t always give us the ability to do so.

Of course, even if we say things like that, there’s no guarantee anyone will listen. Some people’s reactions when I get mad, remind me of the way people giggle at my cat when she swipes someone who touched her in a way that hurts her. It’s like she and I aren’t real enough to them, so our anger is cute and funny.

I’ll also never forget the time someone made an asinine comment when I was out in public. I typed a response and stuck the speaker up to his ear so he could hear it. All his friends burst out laughing. One of them said “Dude, that guy’s cussing you out using a machine!” Which is… so much not the response I was going for.

But still. We need to be able to have the full range of responses that other people can have. To do otherwise smacks too much of that idea that we should be passive and sweet all the time. Being able to say no, being able to cuss, being able to tell people to go away and leave us alone, these are some of the most important things people with communication impairments can learn to say. But often people don’t teach us that stuff, they don’t want us to know it.

Another important thing: Communication pages like this are not just for people who absolutely can’t ever speak. They are for anyone, anywhere, who for whatever reason would be unable to say things like this in situations where they need to be able to say it.

I’ve run into too many people lately who desperately need something like this, but are afraid to use it because they don’t fit the popular image of someone who needs a communication device. Some of them have even been told that it’s horrible or disrespectful of them to even consider using a communication device. But my position on it is that having the most effective communication method possible can result in better emotional and physical health, in some situations it can even save lives.

So given all that? If something like this can make your life better, for any reason at all. Whether you can’t ever speak, can only sometimes speak, can only speak about certain topics, can speak but it isn’t what you mean, can speak but typing or using picture icons works better or uses fewer mental resources. Or anything else like that. Do whatever works best for you, and screw anyone who tells you different.

Anyone who feels the need to act as the supreme gatekeeper of all things assistive technology… not only do they have too much time on their hands, but they are letting ideology get in the way of real people leading better lives. And that is just plain wrong, and fundamentally unfair to people who could benefit from a communication aid.

 

Backwardsness

I remember this happening with several people I spoke to about the machine I tried at MIT: When I explained that it showed physiological stress whenever I moved (that is not remotely present in other people), they said something to the effect of, “Oh, so stress causes movement difficulties, and if you weren’t stressed out you wouldn’t have as much trouble.”

Well, yes, stress can add to movement difficulties. That’s discussed in an interesting way in Interactions of Task Demands, Performance, and Neurology. But I doubt that’s what the machine was measuring.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are running a great distance. By the time you get to the finish, you find yourself sweating and gasping for air.

Imagine further, that someone notices this. They then say, “Oh, you could move much greater distances, I bet, if we found something to suppress your sweating and panting.”

This would sound ridiculous, and be very dangerous for your body. Not being able to sweat is serious: I had that problem on some medications, and it greatly reduced my tolerance for heat (lower than it was already) and exercise. Panting is an attempt to get more air into your body more quickly, and trying to run on less air would not be useful.

But nonetheless, we have situations where they say “Your brain functions certain ways when you are depressed. Therefore these brain functions cause depression!” We don’t even know whether it’s the chicken or the egg, but they think they have the answer.

For another example, I saw an autism “expert” at a time in my life when I alternated between superficially good speech and either inability to speak or really bad speech, usually several times a day by that point. She told me that if she reduced anxiety, then I would not need to use a keyboard. While she picked up the fact that I was really stressed out around speaking, she didn’t pick up the fact that it was the act of speech that stressed me out, and that had stressed me out for my entire life, because of how difficult it was. She didn’t realize that a lot of the stress she saw was an attempt to use sheer momentum to keep speech going (or that this was a reason I talked so much when I did talk — if I stopped, I wasn’t always able to start easily again). Nor did she realize that a keyboard reduced my stress levels immensely in its own right. She just saw two things she thought were associated with each other, defined the causality on her own, and insisted she knew what to do about it and what the results would be.

Reducing stress is usually a good thing in its own right. (I say “usually” because sometimes, stress is a motivator that is indispensable to some people when doing certain things: there are times when if I don’t get enough adrenaline going into doing something, I’m not going to be able to do it. But I have to pay a price for that and so do most people, I have just paid a more obvious price than most, because losing speech is a tad more conspicuous than losing the ability to run really far for awhile.) But my strong suspicion is that this measured stress, for me, is a consequence of the effort of trying to move, not the cause of the difficulty moving.

I wonder why people so often get causality backwards on these things, and then seek to alleviate the result of a problem rather than the cause of it.