“Do you eat salmon, they say it’s good for the bones?”
“Have you tried pumpkin seeds?”
“You should go out more”
Oh we are SO over all this bull from “well-meaning” people who can’t help but offer suggestions as soon as they find out your disabled or ill. So, we made a shirt (and some other things) that are a perfect counter!
[img description: a white male-presenting person in dark gray jeans and a dark teal short sleeve tee shirt. The shirt has a checklist split into 2 parts vertically. The top half reads, “Yes, I’ve Considered: Essential Oils, Accupuncture, Superfoods, Cleanses, Yoga” and each line has a box with a corresponding checkmark in it. The bottom half reads, “Have You Considered: Shutting Up, Minding Your Own Business,” with similar boxes that are NOT checked.”
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To our most popular design from our Teespring, we’ve now added more styles, more items, and more sizes by shifting our store over to Storenvy! Head over to our BRAND NEW STORE HEREto check out all of our Consideration products and so many more snarky designs, perfect for countering all kinds of ableism!
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All proceeds go to support our non-profit venture: PrettySickSupply.com where we focus on bringing fabulous gear to folks with chronic conditions!
God, someone at my son’s school, ON OUR FIRST MEETING, hearing I have fibromyalgia, IMMEDIATELY said “Have you tried paleo?”
I said I was allergic to fad diets, and that I didn’t care for unsolicited medical advice.
“Well, I know when I cleaned my diet up, a lot of my health problems went away, so I thought -”
No, no you didn’t think. You ASSUMED:
-fibro is my own fault
-my diet is shitty
-it worked for your medical problems, it’ll work for my completely different ones
JFC, when I made it clear I didn’t want to hear it, don’t fucking double down. APOLOGIZE.
UUUUGH I especially HATE the diet suggestions. Like, thank you for reminding me that I have food issues too, reallly appreciate it.
Also, we have a few designs related to this nonsense:
and:
being two fo my personal favorites!
Well, I know what I’m asking for comes my birthday!
Last time I had a flare of my mystery arthritis, no fewer than six people asked me if I had tried cutting out gluten. No. No I haven’t, because I do not have Celiac Disease.
People love to talk about whether or not disabled people can work
but if you can work just fine and your disability is destroying your ability to have a life outside of work (because work takes all your energy and more)
Dead silence. Nobody cares.
File this under, oh you can be active for 4 hours? You can work part-time. Um no, I have to get ready for work (30 min) get to work (15 min) get home from work (15 min) feed myself all day (30 min) maintain myself, my home and my life (15 min, yeah right), which leaves 15 min for work and absolutely nothing else.
This is so accurate, back after I’d relapsed I wanted to try and go in for one class at school so I could still stay in contact with the education system. I let slip during a meeting that I managed to drag myself to that I could manage about 4 hours of activity a week, which the teacher sprang on to mean I was being lazy for just trying to get to 1 hour class. Never matter that it was 30 minutes travel, that I would have to get washed and dressed, that I would probably still need to recover for 3 days from it.
Far too often abled people see the things they do easily as “non activities”, they don’t realise that for many disabled people these things have to be carefully planned and measured, and sometimes they simply can’t be done.
reblog bc the non activities thing seems really important words
I get X number of pain-free steps per day right now, which means that, for large conventions (like SDCC), I need to be in a mobility device. I had someone ask if I used up my steps every day before transferring to the scooter, and look surprised and a little horrified when I said “no, I save them so I can go to the bathroom unassisted.” Like, they had never considered that walking is involved in peeing.
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Reblogging for the important point that the term “activity” may mean something very different and much broader for a disabled person with a chronic pain or fatigue related condition compared to its meaning for a non disabled person. If you’re tired enough, simply sitting up in a chair rather than lying in bed is an activity that drains energy otherwise usable for other things. A thing I knew from other people with pain and fatigue related conditions, but worth reinforcing for followers who didnt know or had forgotten.
My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.
I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”
I searched and searched for the post this graphic was from, and the OP deactivated, but I kept the graphic, because my BFF does the same thing, uses her imagination to come up with the worst pain she can imagine and pegs her “10″ there, and so is like, well, I’m conscious, so this must be a 5, and then the doctors don’t take her seriously. (And she then does things like driving herself to the hospital while in the process of giving birth. Probably should have called an ambulance for that one!)
So I found this and sent it to her. Because this is what they want to know: how badly is this pain affecting you? Not on a scale of “nothing” to “how I’d imagine it’d feel if bears were eating my still-living guts while I was on fire”.
I hate reposting stuff, but I’ll never find that post again and OP is deactivated, so, here’s a repost. I can delete this later, i just wanted to get it to you and I can’t embed images in a chat or an ask.
This is possibly why it took several weeks to diagnose my fractured spine.
Pain Scale transcription:
10 – I am in bed and I can’t move due to my pain. I need someone to take me to the emergency room because of my pain.
9 – My pain is all that I can think about. I can barely move or talk because of my pain.
8 – My pain is so severe that it is difficult to think of anything else. Talking and listening are difficult.
7 – I am in pain all the time. It keeps me from doing most activities.
6 – I think about my pain all of the time. I give up many activities because of my pain.
5 – I think about my pain most of the time. I cannot do some of the activities I need to do each day because of the pain.
4 – I am constantly aware of my pain but can continue most activities.
3 – My pain bothers me but I can ignore it most of the time.
2 – I have a low level of pain. I am aware of my pain only when I pay attention to it.
1 – My pain is hardly noticeable.
0 – I have no pain.
It’s also really important to get this kind of scale to people who have chronic pain, because chronic pain drastically lowers your perception of how “bad” any kind of pain actually is, and yet something like this pain scale is extremely user friendly.
For example, if someone asked me how much pain I’m in at any given time, I’d say hardly any, and yet I’m apparently at a chronic 2.5, and it only goes up from there depending on the day.
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