life

dear snippy medical professionals . . .

• by kerri

Don’t start with me. You may have to put up with people like me every single day, but you are not putting up with me every single day. Which means, whoever pissed you off, or made you lose your personality way back when . . . they weren’t me, so you can re-gain your personality and your sense of humour for the five minutes you are with me because I am obviously making the effort.

This is a catch all. It includes all the testing people at my ophthalmologist’s office. It includes every grumpy receptionurse I’ve had to phone to book an appointment. It includes grumpy ladies at the ophthalmologist’s office who don’t seem to understand that i have a life and I work and go to class and yes, maybe I will have to reschedule my yearly ophthalmology appointment three times so that it doesn’t screw up my day/week/etc.

And now, it includes Eye Testing Dolores from today [I hope she is not reading this. If she is, hello Eye Testing Dolores! I hope you are well. Please turn that frown upside down when we meet again next year. I will draw you a picture of rainbows and cupcakes].

Eye Testing Dolores was not a happy camper today. She did not appreciate my light approach to eye testing. Look, lady, you are not twenty years old, with uncorrectable visual impairment in the left eye and ridiculously corrected in the right eye. You are not here because, by no fault of your own, you were born 10 weeks premature and have retinopathy of prematurity. You are not living with this thing every day, and, you are not here because you got hit in the face with a basketball and now need new glasses. It is your choice to work here, so please, do not make me feel like it is my fault that I can’t complete your tests in the first shot, or the third, but I can still actually SEE everything you want me to see. It is just that your flickery box is very distracting and I forget to look at the square, and I have never in my twenty years done all of these stupid tests.

Also, I am the patient, and I [read: my mom] am the one paying you, so honestly, get off your high horse and please refrain from telling me to put my phone away. Because you are not my mom.

After all the stupid eye tests were done, I briefly waited in the waiting room thinger until New Eye Doctor came out. Stupid eye tests took place after the ridiculously long form about my visual/medical history in which I had to indicate all of my father’s eye issues, put all my medications onto little lines, and check the OTHER: box and indicate retinopathy of prematurity, as well as give them my e-mail address for some unknown reason.

your eyes deserve an optometrist poster

and awesome doctors . . .

FInally New Eye Doctor called me in. I am a fan of this guy. The appointment was nothing spectacular, but it turns out my vision has actually improved, albeit marginally. It has only improved slightly, but I have gone form a -18.25 prescription to a -18. New Eye Doctor basically said I am so far gone that this will not make a huge difference (not in those exact words), but kind of cool none-the-less. I’m chalking it up to testing variance, but hey, sweet.  Plus, he had a sense of humour and laughed on multiple occasions.

DOCTOR: Do you have any questions?

ME: Yeah, why do I get to look at the fancy Apple display and you have to work on a crappy Windows laptop?

This was completely true, and it made him laugh. Apparently his colleagues wanted to go Windows and he wanted to go Mac, so they compromised-ish. I think he lost the deal, poor guy.

Now the hard part began, picking glasses. In contrast to Glasses Lady Who Only Wants To Talk To The Person Who Can See [aka my mom] on Tuesday, who really pissed me off. As soon as she took my glasses from me and I couldn’t see, she started talking to my mom instead of me. Woman, just because I can’t see, doesn’t mean I can’t hear. Thank God I couldn’t see her enough to be able to remember her.  Awesome Glasses Lady is ordering some frames in for me to try out [because apparently my face is too small for a bunch of the ones in store, and I can basically only fit some of the children’s glasses. Honestly.]  So once those are in, I get to go back adventuring in Glasses Land, the one specifically for people who need glasses stronger than the normal glasses stores can make–I kid you not.

And maybe I should take Eye Testing Dolores a happy picture just in case I run into her when I go to buy glasses.

life / work

well, it only took me twenty years to break a pair of glasses

• by kerri

So this morning at work, I got hit in the face with a basketball.  I mean, really, that is actually [kind of] awesome, because how many other jobs can you legit get hit in the face with a basketball and be like “Yeah, I was working”.

Really, this is to be expected.  Free play with 43 kids in the gym is absolute chaos, and of course, I threw myself in the middle of it.  I have grown  more adept in a lot of fundamental movement skills myself this year in Movement Ed class, and as always, I like to play. So I was playing catch with a kid and a basketball.

The issue being is that in all this chaos and basketball torpedoing . . . I have a pretty expensive necessity that I barely think about on my face at all times.  Glasses are important, people.  So as the kid took a spin shot of some sort throwing the ball to meI managed to catch the ball . . . with my hands and my face.

It only took me twenty-plus years to kill a pair of glasses. I often wonder how it didn’t happen sooner, because honestly, I have worn glasses since I was eight months old. But today the pair I’ve had for about two years got creamed so bad that they are in a state of temporary repair . . . but are basically on death’s door.

As soon as the ball hit the face, I knew the glasses had an issue. I was at first hoping simply that the impact of the ball on the glasses on the face had just, you know, injured my face. People, when you have the equivalent of what I have learned to be $900 [with no street value] attached to your face, you hope for injuries. The kid apologized. “Did I break your glasses?”
“No worries, bud. I caught it with my face, but give me a minute to see what’s going on.”

Wandered across the gym to my coworker with the glasses still on my face feeling funny. Got her to inspect the glasses because I am pretty dysfunctional visually without the glasses going on. She and I both think it’s probably just the nose pads have bent, which is like, no big deal.

I get off work about a half hour later, and tweet my mom [and the rest of the world].

Get to school and go to my mom’s office, who hasn’t even read my tweet. “So i got hit in the face with a basketball at work this morning, and my glasses are broken and need to be dealt with.”

It’s convenient having your mom working at your school. No sooner do I say it than are we heading out of the office to go to the special glasses store. I have special glasses. They are -18s which means, essentially, i have bad eyes. We get to the special glasses store and they take my glasses and leave me unable to do much except attempt to send coherent tweets from my phone with the screen four centimetres away from my face and play with the mirror.

Apparently it is not just a bent nose-pad. It is a broken frame.  It’s taken me twenty years to break a pair of glasses, and apparently when I made it happen, it happened hardcore. The glasses are now soldered together as a temporary measure but it won’t hold forever. Plus it doesn’t look totally fabulous, but it’s not bad enough to be super noticeable unless you look hard or I tell you. So you all know, so now when you see me you can be like “HEY LOOK ITS THE SILVERY SPOTS ON YOUR BROWN GLASSES.”  I go Thursday for a vision test and to pick out new glasses. This is the issue with having to go to the special glasses store, is that it is literally the only place in the city I can buy glasses, so my choice is expensive and limited. No two-for-one deals for me.

So anyway, the temp solder deal? No fun gym stuff until the new glasses happen. The glasses lady told me basically if I get hit in the face again, the glasses are done-for. And I don’t have a backup at $900 a pop [to reiterate: no two for one deals], and therefore, I cannot afford for these things to be done-for or I literally cannot function.  So I had to go back to school and not be able to participate in Movement Ed. And if we do free play in the gym on Thursday at work, I can’t play in there either.

Honestly, this is a bad thing when your whole life literally revolves around playing in the gym.

[it is a tough life, I tell you]
life

wake up

• by kerri

My friend Mike posts Mirror Mantras to help him get through the week, and I’ve decided to join the positivity.

The coming week is going to be chaos: Spring Break at work so I am throwing back 22 hours, plus my last week of school, plus I am tutoring… and so on. So chaos but also goodness.

Here’s my mantra for the week:

advocacy / kids with disabilities

school is about ability – lakay roberts

• by kerri

If you believe that school is about fostering ability, stick around.

A five-year-old girl with Cerebral Palsy and her mother are in a battle with the New Caney Independent School District in Texas to allow LaKay to use her walker in school instead of her wheelchair.

Read a full article here, and then make your way back here.

I have sent the following e-mail to both Kenn Franklin and Angie Lee of the New Caney ISD regarding LaKay’s battle to be allowed to use her walker while at school.

Good morning, Mr. Franklin

At this point, I believe the e-mails should be about pouring in in response to the discrimination towards five-year-old LaKay Roberts whose walker is being deemed “dangerous” to her safety.  Here is another to add to the folder.

My name is Kerri. I am a Kinesiology and Applied Health student from Canada.  A great deal of what I learn in school is about making school and ALL components of education accessible to ALL children, regardless of ability level. To make all components of education accessible to all children, modifications have to be made. And play is pivotal to the learning process and the socialization process. Please reference Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on the subject if you are not familiar with the view that formal education kills creativity. As an educator, I am sure you can agree that creativity is crucial to the experiential learning process that is so important, especially for young children.

By forcing LaKay to use her wheelchair at all times during school, you are binding her creativity into tighter spaces. You are not allowing her to interact with her world in the most fundamental way possible: through movement and play.

Mr. Franklin, the young woman writing to you right now has spent time in a wheelchair herself. I am now in school learning how to make recreation and play accessible to ALL individuals regardless of their skill level, functional ability, or motor skills. Because the time I spent in a wheelchair and using a walker was enough. It was enough to make me realize that it is easier to be able to move around with a walker even if my movements were awkward or clumsy, than it was to make my wheelchair flow gracefully into small spaces. It was easier to pick objects up from the ground when using my walker than it was to even try to reach the floor when using my wheelchair.  It was considerably easier to explore my environment using the walker, but the wheelchair was available for when distances were too long or when I got too tired . . . as is LaKay’s option.

To force LaKay to use her wheelchair at all times is depriving her of that choice. To children, we both know how important it is in giving them choice in dealing with all life situations. This may be an inconvenience to you as an educator for the years LaKay spends in your school or school district, but LaKay is in this for life. LaKay will recollect this experience for years to come, even though she is only five years old, just as I remember all of the kids asking me why I was wearing “two different shoes”.  Furthermore, LaKay is in a crucial learning period for development of fundamental movement skills. And for her, learning how to most effectively walk, run, jump and hop while using mobility aides like her walker is crucial to her desire and interest in living an active healthy life and being integrated as fully as possible into physical education classes further down the road.  Exploration of movement, such as recess time, is crucial to this skill development. And as an educator, you cannot deprive a child of a chance to learn.

Mr. Franklin, it’s your call. Restrict a child’s access to her mobility aide that she is competent in using with minimal assistance and leave her “safer”, but more dependent. Or, allow the child and her parent to make the choice–who better to know their child’s abilities and limitations, and care more for his or her child than her parent?–and grow, flourish, and thrive.  All children get scrapes and bruises.  All children fall. And all children make choices.  Let LaKay and Kristi make this one.

With respect,

Kerri [last name withheld]

Riled up yet? Please send your own letter to the hotshots at the NC ISD who believe that they are NOT restricting LaKay’s development with their choices to decrease her ability to move while she’s at school. Join the fight to allow LaKay and her mother Kristi make the choice to allow LaKay to experience her equivalent of increased freedom in mobility as the other children in her community.

asthma / badassmatics

not that kind of steroids

• by kerri

Sometimes I swear my doctors don’t communicate, and other times I find myself surprised.  For instance, the pulmonologist that I quit going to see last year (I have another one, it’s all good) put me on Alvesco at the same time that my allergist put me on Pulmicort [in addition to my Symbicort and Atrovent] to see if it would get my asthma in tighter control. [Alvesco and Pulmicort, like FloVent and Qvar, are of the same class of medications, inhaled corticosteroids, which decrease inflammation in the lungs in diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Some people respond to different meds better than other ones.] I walked into my primary care doctor’s office and she said “How’s the Alvesco going?” My response? “What Alvesco?”

Things get lost in the shuffle, even though at the time my three doctors were in the same clinic. [I’ve since ditched the above pulmonlogist and am seeing a different one in the outpatient respiratory clinic, but the same primary care doctor and the same allergist]. Fortunately none of these meds are terribly dangerous, and I’m smart enough to figure most of it out (go figure ;)).

Today I had my yearly[ish, i think] appointment with the allergist. For a girl who doesn’t have many allergies [only dust mites, like every other person on the planet basically], that lady sure talks to me for a long time. She even said “Hi Kerri” to me in the hallway as I was sitting there waiting for them to get the spirometer to check my PFTs. She knows my name people. This is not a fab sign.

As Kate said on Twitter:

@__kerri because you're famous!

 

 

 

 

Yess! I loved this :].

And as my mom said:

@__kerri not the first medical person to do that to you.

[Truth: my pedi orthopedic doc used to go through the back door to x-ray to find us, and then usher us into his office post-x-ray. He knew my mom by her first name, too.]

 

 

So the reason I am shocked with the communication bit, is that the allergist said “So you saw [primary care doctor] for an exacerbation awhile ago?” Sheesh, I barely remember this. I had some exercise-induced asthma issue going on and was trying to avoid prednisone but be responsible about the whole bit. I could barely pinpoint the whole event.

As for the rest of the appointment, I didn’t get the numbers but my spiro was good, and the allergist thinks she’s done all the medication reducing we can do while still remaining in a state of more stability regarding the asthma. We have finally struck a balance, and I am happy! Considering I’ve dropped from 3-4 puffs of Symbicort 2-3 times a day by adding in the Qvar and the Atrovent to 1-2 twice a day . . . AND I’ve decreased mmy Atrovent some . . . this is GOOD!  Most importantly, I FEEL better than I did even a year and a half ago.

Unfortunately, though, my sinuses weren’t in check. This is not a huge deal, and rhinitis, both allergic and non-allergic, are common with asthma. Though I’ve noticed some sinus issues, I just typically ignore them and if they get bad-ish and the asthma gets bad simultaneously, I’ll throw an anti-histamine at them. I am kind of whatever towards my sinuses, which is definitely [apparently] not the best attitude to have.

Turns out there is “significant thick mucus” in my sinuses. So that’s gross or whatever. It is probably allergic-rhinitis caused by the dust allergy, so I have to deal with it year-round. And I get to inhale more steroids, into my nose, to deal with it. I guess the more unfortunate bit of it, is that I have to take another medicine and spray it up my nose. Lovely right? Hello Nasonex. More inhaling steroids for me. Gotta love chronic diseases in which you have to take medicine and that basically means forever.

Hello, this is what I mean when I say people with asthma are badasses. Look, I’m snorting steroids AND inhaling them now. Like how much more badass can you get?

Kidding.

Eff, seriously. But whatever, if it helps, I am game. Bring on the Good Things.