Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I was very very lucky in that I had two friends/mentors who had been dealing with disability a lot longer than me who helped me with some basic survival shit. Like "it's okay to get a second opinion" and "doctors don't know everything."

(I mean, my mom also has Lupus, but she is like most nurses the worst patient and also kinda invested in the medical model. I needed some bad crips to help me navigate the current effed up medical system.)

Like just humor at the ridiculousness of it all? One of those friends is on dialysis and whenever I ask him how he's doing he's like "well I'd be FINE if my insurance company would stop mandating that I take these suicide inventories. Like gee, thanks for reminding me how much dialysis sucks." and then we gripe about all this bullshit together, and it's less bad.

I'm also eternally amused/frustrated by the irony of the fact that I was taking a sociology class that was going to cover the social model of disability, but I had to withdraw from classes that semester because my health went to shit so I never got to attend those lectures. I did read some of the course readings (mostly by John Hockenberry) and it helped, but if I'd known *more* about the social model of disability when I first got sick? Like, actually had class discussions about it? That would have been nice too.

Even with all that help from other disabled people, there was definitely a dark, dark period where I tried to use religion to heal myself and it actually just ended up being a shitshow. But the moral of that particular story is trust your gut, and not neopagan chiropractors who tell you such gems as "people who aren't on disability tend not to be as sick, it's all about your attitude" when they first meet you and find out you have a disability.