r/DisabilityHistory

After his first birthday, his parents started a Facebook page which cataloged his life and a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for his medical expenses.

He was born in Orlando, Florida and upon his birth was immediately rushed into the neonatal intensive care unit, where he stayed for 3 and a half weeks. He had been born with a portion of his skull missing, several cranial differences, a lot of visible bruising, and his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck.

Microhydranencephaly is a condition that has traits of both microcephaly and hydranencephaly:

Microcephaly is a neurological and birth condition that causes an infant’s brain and head to be significantly smaller than average. Microcephaly is a spectrum where some people require higher support needs than others, and some people have more prominent neurological differences than others.

Hydranencephaly is a rare birth condition that affects the central nervous system where a person’s cerebral hemispheres in the brain are missing and that space is instead filled with sacs of cerebrospinal fluid.

He recovered enough to be sent home where his parents were living in Tavares, Florida. He was mostly nonverbal but enjoyed saying “hello” and often mimicked the sounds that different words made. He was unable to walk, was fed through a feeding tube, and had frequent seizures, but continuously surpassed doctors expectations based on the health complications he experienced after being born.

He was described as being very happy and giggly for most of his life. His parents supported him in every way they could and made sure he had as typical of a life as possible, bringing him outdoors, frequently reading stories to him, and bringing him to meet a mall Santa during the holidays.

His parents eventually released a book that further detailed their lives with Jaxon, and brought Jaxon on talk shows and shared his story with news outlets.

He and his family eventually moved to North Carolina, where he lived the rest of his life. His health began to decline in early 2020, and he was placed in hospice care. His parents explained that they knew it was likely for his health to decline and wanted to make sure he had several comfortable weeks surrounded by everyone who loved him. He passed away at the age of 5 and his parents took down his Facebook page soon after.

Sofia Sanchez has Down Syndrome she played Wovey in the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. She was born in Ukraine and was adopted by a American Jennifer and Hector Sanchez. They already had three sons the youngest named Joaquin with Down Syndrome. They discovered Sofia through Reece's Rainbow.

After donating to a holiday campaign featuring Sofia Jennifer felt a immediate connection with her picture and the couple fast tracked her to process to adopt her at sixteen months.

The Invisible Disability & Illness Pride Flag represents people with disabilities and illnesses that may not be immediately visible or apparent to others.

It aims to spread awareness that a disability or illness does not have to be visible to be real, valid, or deserving of respect and understanding. The flag also represents diversity, self-acceptance, dignity, and solidarity among people with different experiences.

Symbolism:

🟡 Yellow — hope, visibility, and recognition.

🩶 Light gray — the aspects of disability and illness that may not be immediately seen or understood.

🌻 Sunflower — growth, resilience, and the individuality of each person.

🤎 Brown circle — community and the shared humanity of people with different experiences.

💛 Heart — self-respect, acceptance, and compassion.

💧 Drops — the diverse challenges and experiences associated with invisible disabilities and illnesses.

This is a proposed community-created flag, not an officially recognized universal symbol.

How did people who could not see find a way to read?

Louis Braille was born in France in 1809. He lost his eyesight at the age of four after an accident. Later, he studied at an institution for blind students in Paris.

At that time, students at the institution read books that used large, raised letters. The system worked, but the books were extremely large and heavy.

Reading was slow, and producing these books was difficult. But there was an even bigger problem. The system made it very difficult for blind students to write on their own.

Then a military officer named Charles Barbier introduced a system at the institution that had originally been created for soldiers. It used raised dots so that soldiers could read messages by touch, even in the dark. The system used 12 raised dots.

Louis Braille saw a possibility in it.

He realised that if the 12-dot system could be made simpler, it could become a much more practical way for blind students to read and write.

In 1824, when he was only 15 years old, Louis Braille developed his own system based on six raised dots. The six dots were arranged in two columns. Different combinations of these dots could represent letters, and they could be easily recognised by touch.

Over time, the same six-dot system was expanded to represent not just letters, but also punctuation, numbers and musical notation.

A system originally created as a military code had become the foundation for a new way of reading and writing through touch.

Louis Braille continued developing his system and published his first book about it in 1829. He died in 1852 at the age of 43. Two years after his death, in 1854, his school officially adopted the Braille system.

From there, the system gradually spread to different parts of the world. Today, Braille remains an important means of reading and writing for blind and visually impaired people around the world.

There is something important about human excellence in the story of Louis Braille.

He did not simply accept an existing system because it was already there. He looked at both its usefulness and its limitations. Where others saw a military code, he saw a possibility.

Human excellence is not just about surviving difficult circumstances. Sometimes, it is about understanding the systems that already exist and seeing what else might be possible within them.

Louis Braille could not restore his eyesight, but he did not allow that limitation to become the limit of what was possible for him.

And perhaps that is the most remarkable part of his story.

He did not create a way to read only for himself. He developed a system that went far beyond his own life and eventually became a way for millions of blind and visually impaired people around the world to read and write.

If we encounter a limitation in our own lives that we cannot change, do we simply accept that limitation as our identity, or can we try to find a new possibility within it?

Sources:

Blindness History Basics: The War of the Dots https://www.aph.org/blog/blindness-history-basics-the-war-on-the-dots/

Blindness History Basics: The First Publication of the Braille Code https://www.aph.org/blog/blindness-history-basics-the-first-publication-of-the-braille-code/