u/harvestmonster

Not looking for advice, but support would be nice. I was put on administrative leave before a hearing to decide whether I will be terminated. I was in the middle of an ADA accommodation request that got repeatedly stymied and delayed. My eight months at this place tanked my mental and physical health. They've been trying to manage me out for a while, but I endured it for health insurance and rent money.

I've been dissociating so much at work to survive it, which meant my employer had lots of opportunity to scrutinize my mistakes while my health declined.

I'm glad I do not have to enter that building tomorrow. I kept spiraling from the all the stress. I could not have been working in a worse environment for my mental and physical disabilities.

I got two rough diagnoses this year: me/cfs and lynch syndrome. The former has pretty profoundly changed my life in a short amount of time. The latter is a genetic mutation that makes me high risk for a gaggle of cancers. I've been trucking through it on the surface but I'm not coping well. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was three and it's always been my biggest fear to get cancer.

To think that I'm going to lose my healthcare and my income right now is terrifying. I've got 13 different doctors I need to see, medical bills piling up, a shit ton of meds to keep me stable-ish, and the job market is shit?

And I'm turning thirty this december...

I cannot believe how awful this year has been. I feel so lost and beaten down.

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I was diagnosed with both this year and learned, to great dismay, that Lynch Syndrome can make it very difficult to get on disability. I'm still working right now, but I've been missing work a lot, and my employer has threatened to terminate me after denying work accommodations.

So not only am I coping with my loss of function, loss of mobility, and my ability to think; I also have to contend with my greatest fear of getting cancer coming true. All with the knowledge that it'll be even more difficult for me to get disability benefits.

I've dealt with chronic pain, mental health issues, and fatigue for a decade now. That was hard enough, but I still managed to get through college, graduate school, and a two-year job contract. Life with ME/CFS is so so so much worse and I guess I'm only "mild" since I'm still managing to work.

Now I feel like I have no options. I can't keep up full-time in-person work much longer, but I absolutely need health insurance to manage my ME/CFS, my depression and C-PTSD, access hormones for transition, and get the regular screenings I need to watch for a fuck ton of cancers. It doesn't seem like disability will be an option for me and I know it can take years to get. I already know that my bills are too high to survive off of disability benefits anyway. I don't have a family to rely on for support. All the people I know live in poverty.

I'm searching hard for full-time remote work with benefits to keep me afloat. I keep oscillating between grief and a numb acceptance that my diagnoses are a fact that I must accept and manage. I'm turning thirty this year and it feels like too much for one person to cope with. I wish we lived in a world where disabled people could receive the care they need and not be forced into state mandated poverty.

I was diagnosed recently - about two months ago. My doctors and I are trying to treat what we can to improve my baseline (sleep, vitamin deficiencies, pain management, etc.) My biggest issue right now is HR monitoring is pointless due to my dsyautonomia. I can't stay under my anerobic threshold if I surpass it simply by being upright. My cardiologist wants to start me on beta blockers after we finish testing to determine between inappropriate sinus tachycardia or POTS. Did starting beta blockers help improve your baseline energy and fatigue?

For those not familiar with the term, forced intimacy is "the common, daily experience of disabled people being expected to share personal parts of ourselves to survive in an ableist world." This term was coined by disability activist, Mia Mingus: forced intimacy

I'm a multi-disabled trans librarian who uses a cane to get around. On a weekly, if not daily basis, I am asked invasive questions by patrons about my cane or my choice to mask. These questions are almost always asked with a sense of entitlement or challenge to prove my disability and explain why I require a mask or cane. (Often while getting misgendered.)

In an ordinary circumstances, I would tell someone asking these questions to fuck off, because they aren't entitled to that knowledge. But, because I am constrained by the professional standards of library work, I am expected to politely engage with these patrons and redirect the conversation back to aiding them within the library. Setting boundaries surrounding my disability and asserting that I do not need to answer these questions will prompt patrons to interrogate further and to ask more coercive questions.

In Mingus's blog post, she discusses forced intimacy as an oppressive norm required to get basic access. In the context of library work, I am the one facilitating access to the library's amenities, yet I am still expected to explain and justify my disability to complete strangers. I know, as a trans and disabled person, that my work and patron interactions will be heavily scrutinized by higher-ups. I also know that my job security is much worse than my able-bodied, cisgendered coworkers. I have to choose my words very carefully because I know that it can endanger my livelihood and that my employer will not support or back me should patrons interpret my boundaries as hostility.

I'm interested to hear other disabled and/or librarians' thoughts on this. I think there is still so much work to be done to make sure marginalized library workers are supported and protected.

I was recently diagnosed with ulcerative colitis after a colonoscopy. They've started me on mesalamine suppositories, but even before the medication, I was getting severely nauseous directly after eating. I've lost 17lbs at an alarming weight because eating has gotten so hard and the accompanying diarrhea/multiple bm's clearing me out.

Any advice? I've been eating bland and in very small quantities, but absolutely everything upsets my stomach right now. Do I need to wait out the symptoms as the medications do their stuff?

I've been so ill and weak from all this, and it's so frustrating.

I'm chronically ill and going through a health crisis right now. Most of my doctors are good about using my preferred name and pronouns, but the nurses are not. I had a full endoscopy today, and one of the nurses kept misgendering me despite being corrected several times. He misgendered me to my face, to my partner, and to the other nurses. It's very scary to be sedated when you cannot fully trust the people providing you care that you desperately need.

I'm considering calling the endoscopy center to lodge a complaint about it.

I'm on week two and dealing with nausea, lightheadedness, general fatigue, and malaise. We've been increasing slowly to lessen the side effects, but it's been hitting me hard.

I've been taking ibuprofen ahead of my appointments, and I'm waiting on my pharmacy to fill some anti-nausea meds. I never feel pain during the treatments, but I feel like a truck hit me afterward. It feels similar to the post-exertional malaise I deal with already.

I've heard it get better after the second week, but boy is this hard.