draconicace

[draconicace]

I've been disabled for almost 29 years. Here's what I've learned.

Tablets sink and capsules float. Separate out your tablets and capsules when you go to take them. Tip your head down when taking capsules and up when taking tablets. Liquigels don't matter, they kinda stay in the middle of whatever liquid is in your mouth.

If your pill tastes bad, coat it with a bit of butter or margarine. I learned this from my mom, who learned it from a pharmacist.

Being in pain every day isn't normal. Average people experience pain during exceptional moments, like when they stub their toe or jam their finger in a door, not when they sit cross-legged.

Make a medical binder. Make multiple medical binders. I have a small one that comes with me to appointments and two big ones that stay at home, one with old stuff and one with more recent stuff.

Find your icons. Some of mine include Daya Betty (drag queen with diabetes), Stef Sanjati (influencer with Waardenburg syndrome and ADHD), and Hank Green (guy with ulcerative colitis who... does a bunch of stuff). They don't have to be disabled in the same way as you. They don't even have to be real people. Put their pictures up somewhere if you want; I've been meaning to decorate my medical binders with pictures of my icons.

Take a bin, box, bag, basket, whatever and fill it with items to cope with. This can be stuff for mentally coping like colouring books or play clay or stuff for physically coping like pain medicine or physio tape.

Decorate your shit! My cane for at home has a plushie backpack clip hanging from the end of the handle and my cane for going places is covered in stickers. All of my medical binders have fun scrapbooking paper on the outside. Sometimes, I put stickers and washi tape on my inhalers and pill bottles. I used my Cricut to decorate my coping bin with quotes from my icons, like "I've seen enough of Ba Sing Se" and "I need you to be angrier with that bell".

If a flare-up is making you unable to eat or keep food down, consider going to the ER. A pharmacist once told me that since my eye flares can make me so nauseous that I cannot eat, then I need to go to the hospital when that happens.

Cola works wonders for nausea. I have mini cans of Diet Pepsi in my coping bin.

Shortbread is one of the only things I can eat when nauseous. Giant Tiger sells individually-wrapped servings of shortbread around Christmas or the British import store sells them year-round. I also keep these in my coping bin.

Unless it violates a pain contract or something, don't be afraid to go behind your doctor's back to get something they are refusing you. I got my cardiologist referral by getting in with a different NP at my primary care clinic than who I usually saw. I switched from Seroquel to Abilify by visiting a walk-in.

If you have a condition affecting your abdomen in some way (GI issues, reproductive problems, y'know) then invest in track pants that are too big. I bought some for my laparoscopy over a year ago and they've been handy for pelvic pain days, too. I've also heard loose pants are good for after colonoscopies.

Do whatever works, even if it's weird. I've sat on the floor of the Eaton Centre to take my pills. I've shoved heating pads down my front waistband to reach my uterus.

High-top Converse are good for weak ankles. I almost exclusively wear them.

You can reuse your pill bottles for stuff. I use my jumbo ones to store makeup sponges and my long skinny ones to hold a travel-size amount of Q-Tips.

Just because your diagnostics come back with nothing, it doesn't mean nothing is wrong. Maybe you were checking the wrong thing, or the diagnostic tool wasn't sensitive enough. I have bradycardia episodes even though multiple cardiac tests caught nothing. I probably have endometriosis even though my gynecologist didn't see anything.

You can bring your comfort item to appointments, and it's generally a green flag when someone talks to you about it. I brought a Squishmallow turkey (named Ulana) to my laparoscopy and they had her wearing my mask when I woke up. I brought a Build-A-Bear cat (named Blinx) to another procedure and a nurse told me that everyone in the hall on the way to the procedure room saw him and were talking about how cute he was. Both of those ended up being positive experiences and every person who talked to me about my plushies was nice to me. If you don't feel comfortable having it visible to your provider during the appointment, you can hide it in your bag and just know it's there, or if you're in a video appointment, you can hold it below frame in your lap.

Get a small bucket, fill it with stuff, and stick it in your bed (if you have room for it). I filled a bucket with Ensure, juice boxes, oatmeal bars, lotion, my rescue inhaler, etc. in October 2023 in anticipation of my laparoscopy and I still have it in my bed as of January 2025.

If your disability impacts your impulse control (e.g. ADHD, bipolar disorder), you should consider setting limits around your spending -- no more than X dollars at a time, nothing online unless it's absolutely necessary, and so on. Or, run these purchases by someone you trust before committing to them; I use my BFF groupchat to help talk sense into myself when I buy stuff.

Feel free to add on what you've learned about disability!

[draconicace]

Get it, Kim 👍

[draconicace]

hi everyone! the developer of the website I host Explorerz on is having a hard time covering his monthly costs. i think Comicfury is such a wonderful space for comics and one of the few remaining websites that values art over predatory profiteering. Kyo makes it a point to keep the game level - ads are opt-in, custom css for comics is available to everyone, etc. if you can spare a couple bucks each month (the lowest tier is $3 which shakes up to 36 dollars a year), you’d be preserving one of bastions of creator-centered webcomic culture and helping it continue its growth!

[draconicace]

just had an ice-cold shower thanks to my roommate, how's everyone else

[draconicace]

love it when i rb someone's art and then see them rb/like some posts from me. it's like streetpass

[draconicace]

PALEDRIVER - "Yes. There is a *protagonista*..." She gestures to the intersection. "And an *adversário*. I am on the side of the Adversary. There's no coming back from that haul."

HALF LIGHT - I don't like the sound of any of that. Sounds like a horrible drug. The worst one of them all.

[draconicace]

PALEDRIVER - "*O sim*..." The woman stares at you, her mind elsewhere now, on other matters.

VOLITION - Something in her is pulling toward some unknown rest state. She twitches -- like a sleep kick.

[draconicace]

Day 39

[draconicace]

KIM KITSURAGI - "Are you okay, officer?" You feel the lieutenant pat you on the back. Heavy, rhythmic pats.

ESPRIT DE CORPS - The weight is reassuring. Like a crenel on solid fortification. Pat pat pat...

KIM KITSURAGI - "You're facing tough odds here. It's aggravated further by alcohol withdrawal."

[draconicace]

ENCYCLOPEDIA - An innocence is infallible. The decisions made by one are not decisions. They are inevitabilities -- what would have happened anyway, only accelerated, packed into decades instead of centuries. An Innocence is a continuous, compressed event, a sacred human being. It is an honour and a glory to live when one is in office.

YOU - Is one in office now?

ENCYCLOPEDIA - No. We are alone.

[draconicace]

i do need to draw fem hdb at some point because i alone am brave enough to give her chin hair. or alternatively red and infected skin from plucking the hairs out. she is not using salicylic acid. allowing the hair to grow is her mutton chops shaving moment because it draws more attention to her chin and disability. kim has the opposite reaction to in-game after hearing harry will keep the hair. hell yeah

[draconicace]

ENDURANCE - This is your chance. Ask her, is it really possible?

YOU - "Hold on, you said it *was* possible to turn back time, through the pale..."

PALEDRIVER - "*Xerife*, what you understand wouldn't fill a pamphlet..."

PALEDRIVER - "You don't need to turn back time. The pale is already churning with it. As the tide of pale rises, so does the past. Someday both will cover the whole world. That's it. That's the story."

[draconicace]

I love how much Garte genuinely loves the Whirling. It is a special place even if it’s a terrible job. It's this miraculously intact piece of prewar Revachol history at ground zero of the coalition's landfall. It’s crazy. It’s beautiful.

[draconicace]

Electrochemistry

[draconicace]

OUR ⭐🦌 shitpost @palin-tropos

[draconicace]

Hey y'know when the current moment is transcendently beautiful and meaningful and true, but you know that it is temporary and you can't help but feel existentially haunted by that fact. You know when you are experiencing beautiful heartrending art and you feel lost in the moment and then its over. You know how you'll experience art or human connection or a walk on a nice day and you know the sunlight on your skin will fade and you'll forget how it felt to be this warm.

You know in video games when there is one experience-definingly gleeful or touching or viscerally emotional moment that soon ends and leaves you with something more complicated, more doomed, more cyclical? You know? You know how it feels to dig your claws and teeth into a moment and try as hard as you can to feel it and to remember it and to make it part of yourself? Do you know??