Black Cats and Code

This is part of why damn near every single time I'm forced to cross or change routes or worse forced into the road by shit parking, I make *noise*. The sort of sweary indignance that is very difficult to ignore. If I guilt even one person into not parking like a prick next time then I'm happy.

Babylon 5! Fantastic characters, long and pretty complex arcs but they don't punish you for missing something. Can be a little dark, but I wouldn't say hugely moreso than things like SG1.

As a wheelchair user I've been known to strategically plan any trip to my local tesco where I won't have help to minimise the number of items I will need help with. I rely very much on 'nearby tall people' :D

Black cat with green eyes, two white whiskers and perked up ears is sat on an overbed table in front of a laptop, looking directly at camera. She knows she's in the way and she doesn't care.

I adopted an incredibly shy 10 year old void and it was one of the best things I've ever done. This cat who wouldn't let anyone near her for a long while now weaves between ambulance crew and climbs on their equipment because she does not care :D (I'm fine, just disabled!)

Mine do the extremely irritating trick of not telling you (and sometimes not the GP) why they're going to be calling. Which is not great when at any given moment there's probably 5 things it could be. I have a call on Wednesday which I think is for some much needed MRI results but 🤷‍♂️

As a side note, for those with hypermobility, muscle weakness from neuro bullshit sucks absolute arse when the only reason your joints were remotely stable is because your muscles were desperately holding them together!

She pulled the sheets to start the assessment and just went 'my god you're hypermobile aren't you' (reader: my knees were hyperextended backwards while lying in bed!) My elbows were also in a very 'I didn't know that's not normal' position.

Currently dealing with some medical shit, and I've known for *an while* I have EDS but it's not on my notes bc medical bullshit and misogyny. An OT came to help assess transfers etc and I hadn't even mentioned being hypermobile.

Also, as an addition (and not a criticism at all!), the two can and fucking do coexist and it can be an absolute nightmare of balancing conflicting access needs within a single person. This is why I use able bodied when I mean 'not bodily disabled' and abled when I mean 'not at all disabled'.

Yes, this, so much! The words we use are descriptors to help us describe our orientation and identities to others but they're not binding, prescriptive boxes (or at least, they very much shouldn't be).

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I'm trans and disabled and have recently deteriorated significantly and I'm trying to make my life now I'm largely bedbound (with not nearly enough carers) a lot easier and more independent.

I'd appreciate any help at all.

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Former change ringer, and my immediate reaction was 'I hope to god those bells hadn't been left up or they're going to get one hell of a surprise'.

I hear this. Another way I've tried to think about it is that I can't control whether they choose to do some introspection and apologise. And it's like walking around with a weight tied to my ankle hoping that they will. And if they do, all it changes is that it opens the door to reconnecting.

pitted against each other for no reason other than it serves car drivers for us to be at odds. I'm just pleading with cyclists on the pavement to recognise that on the pavement, they are not the most vulnerable road user and to act accordingly. This is only referring to non-mixed-use pavements.

comes barrelling at me at a speed where they would definitely do me harm if they crashed into me. Kill me? No. But certainly ruin my day, week or even a couple of months if they do damage to my chair. It's infuriating because pedestrians and cyclists *should* be on the same side but we're often

It's especially jarring if you're a wheelchair user and the cyclist then gets mad at you for not getting out of their way (when generally I *can't*). I *completely* understand why cyclists are on the pavements, the roads suck. But I *will* get upset when a cyclist on a non-road-legal ebike

Yeah that sounds like a solid solution that would certainly have worked for me. It's not like it's such a huge height that the ramp would have to be either very long or very steep.

Absolutely, makes sense :)

If it's similar to the trains used for the double-decker RE trains, there was a small level area (with a space for a chair) before it stepped down. You were limited to a pretty small space but yeah.

This was a RE train rather than an TNCF one, I should note. But I would imagine the solution is similar - ramps and staff assistance.

Oh! This was exacerbated by the Reisenzentrum at Karlsruhe insisting I not only didn't need to, but *couldn't* book assistance for a regional train. So we were panicking because the DB Mobilitätservicezentrum didn't reliably have english speakers available and our German wasn't exactly fluent.

They switched us (using a ramp) at a station with 55cm or thereabouts platforms and then into the wheelchair carriage. They did also get a ramp out at our final stop although it was only for a few cm, so even my chair would probably have managed.

I can answer this because I ran into it and it *sucked*. I don't know what the 'official' answer is, but when I travelled to Ringsheim from Karlsruhe, I was able to enter the train at Karlsruhe in the bicycle carriage. Then at a later stop we were found by a member of staff.

I'm glad that you've got yours out now and I'm hoping they stay out :) Screw the middle-aged cis men with no fucking clue about any other anatomy than their own. (source for my knowledge here, had one catheter or another for the last 6 years pretty much)

I mostly ended up teaching myself along with some help from a wonderful outpatient Urology specialist nurse. (dunno about in Germany, but at least here in the UK, you tend to end up on general surgical wards with urological stuff and they just don't always have that knowledge).

An utter tool, given that there are specific products (some of which don't even have adhesive, and ought to work fine even with 3 catheters bundled in them) to make it so you don't have to stick porous tape down there. But Urologists seem to know fuckall about those things.

So my rule of thumb is that image of/picture of is not helpful for the reasons you describe. But for instance: photo of, hand drawing of, digital drawing of, painting of, scan of or screenshot of text reading <text> can be helpful as they're communicating something new and visual.

In my experience with the flaky salt (that by the sounds of it is basically the same idea) in the UK, you can pretty easily see it with the naked eye - but it might be that some US Kosher Salts have a smaller grain where it's less obvious.

It's gonna be a couple of days (can't currently sit in my wheelchair for very long!) but I will definitely share.

Yeah absolutely go ahead! :) My transfer board took 3 *months* because it was a special order, I've broken my bed 3 times in 4 years even though I'm technically within the limit and my backup manual chair can't even fit out my front door. And that's just the most obvious examples.