The ICI Experience:

National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week // Bloggers Unite I'm writing today as part of Bloggers Unite, which is an off shoot of BlogCatalog . Bloggers Unite is an attempt to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By asking bloggers to write about a particular subject on a particular day, a single voice can be joined with thousands to help make a difference in raising awareness of a particular issue, in our case, ICI. I've chosen to write about chronicity vs. disability because it's an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a few years now. Laurie Edwards, of A Chronic Dose wrote a similar post recently, titled Illness vs. Disability . In it she says "people with chronic illness may be considered disabled, but people with disabilities do not always have chronic illness." This is an important distinction. Her post goes further into the semantics of the situation, and she promises we'll hear more from ...

Some of the more recent history of human rights - From Wikipedia on Human Rights: The history of human rights covers thousands of years and draws upon religious, cultural, philosophical and legal developments throughout recorded history. We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights , that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . United States Declaration of Independence ~Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, as authorized by the Continental Congress, July 2, 1776 with minor revisions and released publicly on July 4, 1776. “ ...recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world ” —Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 The term inalienable rights refers to a theoretical set of individual human ...

Speak no evil , originally uploaded by starshine_diva . This is the best article I've seen yet on invisible disabilities. It's titled " 'But You Look So Good!' and 7 Other Things NOT to Say to a Person With a Non-Visible Disability " and it's from " DiversityInc Magazine: Diversity and the Bottom Line" . Imagine that. Something good from the bowels of corporate America. Forgive my attitude. It'll probably get better a few more years down the road from my experience with that government job where they threw me away because I had one disability too many. Government, corporate, they're all the same, right? OK, back to the good-- The kicker is the last section. It took me a minute to get it, what the 5 second difference meant, and it's so true . Here's the last section: This Means You If you think this won't be a concern until old age, take note: 75 percent of people with chronic conditions are younger than 65. One...

S/he is from Canada but it sounds pretty right on for the U.S. too. sick , originally uploaded by jungmoon . From Dominie Bush's 8/4/07 newsletter--Item #5 : FMS/CFIDS SUFFERER IS CARETAKER, Daughter & Mother "Just quickly perusing your latest compilation (fantastic FM/CFS newsletter!!!!!) and as I read am struck by two things. 1) how many people with FM and CFS are prescribed a plethora of drugs to control or supposedly "cure" symptoms and 2) being desperately ill and socially ostracized we who have FM and CFS are almost every time I read about treatment, told that another medication can make the difference or is the missing magic bullet to cure us. Dominie, I have had this illness definitively diagnosed in 1996 but had it for at least ten years before that so for over 20 years I have had it and have tried everything that I have come across to try to get better - all kinds of drugs, eating programs, sleeping aids, exercises, rest, relocations, etc. and a...

This is a history of my blog/journal attempts prior to this one. I started out at http://sherrillynn.greatestjournal.com/, as a record of the process I was going through in applying for Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) in 2004. Then I was able to start working and the journal laid unused for a couple of years. I worked part time in 2004-2005, then got a full time job in July of 2005. This summer of 2006 I was terminated from the full time job which I really liked, because I was sick with invisible (or concealed) chronic illnesses. Then I decided my blog should be a record of the claim I was filing on the discrimination of my employer on the basis of my disability. Then I (quite wisely) decided it probably wasn't too good to be posting stuff about my discrimination claim against my former employer, while the investigation was going on. Now the blog is about what happened, what's happening, and how I deal with it. I'm trying to channel my feelings into som...