respiratory insufficiency

My FEDup™Rant: I Adjusted to Wearing a Face-Mask By Wearing a Face-Mask

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment
FED UP TM Ideas worth ranting about

I’m FEDup with people saying they can’t adjust to wearing masks even though they help protect lives during a pandemic.

If you have access to a mask but won’t wear it, take a #CripTip: Shift your narrative from, “I CAN’T ADJUST!” to “I will adjust and it will take time.”

I get it. Masks feel strange and uncomfortable. But unless you’re one of the relatively few who truly cannot physically tolerate wearing a mask, face shield, or other face covering, it’s not about whether you can. It’s about whether you want to.

Since you presumably want to save lives during a pandemic, the first step is dealing with what you’re telling yourself about wearing a mask and then, as needed, unpacking that typically messy box where emotions and physical feelings are stored in a jumble.

Note: I’m not addressing this to the, “But I shouldn’t HAVE to wear a mask and I won’t!” crowd. I have many skills but Fixing Selfish Magical Thinking isn’t one of them.

Ingrid wearing a colorful cloth face-mask, sitting next to a fuschia orchid

Photo credit: Christopher Egusa

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My FEDup™Rant: I Want to Be Envied

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment
FED UP TM Ideas worth ranting aboutI’m FEDup with aiming way too low.
I realized this after Congress voted this week to deny me the pleasure of peeing like non-disabled people do, which is to say, without having to do any kind of math, scheduling, or general advance planning when going out to public places.
But by being denied the minimum, I’ve learned to want everything.
You know what would be great? If I could be envied by non-disabled people.
Yes – envy’s bad! I shouldn’t want to be envied. I should want inclusion. Justice. Equality. I should want respect, love, acceptance.
Of course I want all that. But I want more.
I want to be envied by non-disabled people. Not admired. Envied.
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And Now a Word From the FuckAbility™ Research Council on Top Chef, Season 15, Episodes 5 and 6

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments

In Which the FuckAbility™ Research Council DisRespectfully Suggests Tom Colicchio Was High When He Allowed a Cooking Challenge to be Held at 7,500 Feet Above Sea Level Given That One Cheftestant Was Pregnant and Two Others Were Using C-PAPs

Please pack your ableism and go

(The Height of Ignorance, CO)  In a shocking twist, a pregnant woman and two men who don’t breathe great found this week’s battle to be a literally uphill one when they were dumped on a friggin’ mountaintop site where Lando Calrissian is planning to break ground for his Cloud City Diner. The guest judge, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, announced the week’s challenge: Make a truly memorable dish for your own memorial service.

And — as every *real* chef should be able to do — pitch a tent in deep snow, walk around in the snow, endure freezing temperatures for over 24 hours, and manipulate sharp implements with exposed hands.

it’s even money at this point whether top chef knows that the “chilling effect” of asinine workplace practices and attitudes on women and disabled workers won’t be corrected with a thermostat.

With all due dis-respect to restaurant kitchen tradition and gulags everywhere, fuck that noise. Just because Leann still won episode 5 doesn’t make it acceptable that she had to forfeit the rest of the competition in episode 6. Seriously, she’s a fucking powerhouse and you fucked with the career trajectory of a hard-working woman chef of color. Yeah, she knew what the challenge was and, yeah, it was her pregnancy. So? That’s quite a fucking choice for her, isn’t it?

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And Now a Word From the FuckAbility™ Research Council on the Film Breathe

/ Ingrid Tischer / 4 Comments

FuckAbility™ Research Council’s The DisHon. Hilaria Mirth-Sitwell on Crippling Whilst Posh in Breathe 

Noblesse cripplege, not suicide, is the duty of the upper classes

(Never-on-Thames, England) Mr Serkus’s Breathe is, throughout much of its duration, stoutly British. The central lovers are married to one another and the story refrains from any Lawrencian tendency to evoke the natural world in a throbbing manner, with its gamekeepers and their delicate ways with the lady pigeons. Nor does the film make sickness or injury itself a manifestation of character. Which is not to say that Mr Cavendish’s external journey of affliction is disconnected from his internal moral development. No, it is clear that there can be no overcoming without the hurdle, and our hero finds his way forward by not only embracing Mrs Cavendish but also his sense of duty.  I do admire resolve in the face of adversity and in this respect I say to the film, Well done.

Now, about this business of inspiration: The film is inspirational because it is about the development of inspiring equipment, which is to say, a breathing apparatus. But then there is the ending. One has just seen Mr Cavendish not only triumph over his respiratory insufficiency but help his fellows in suffering. At this moment, he chooses to commit suicide because he wishes to die on his own terms. Ordinarily one must read the lesser ancients, or the wholly American, to find a more blatant have-it-your-way message than the phrase,  on one’s own terms. Is there a more more plaintive call for Nanny than this proud proclamation that one shall have one’s cake and eat it, too? 

One might understand a young man, in the throes of a new invalidism, chucking it all. But a mature husband and father, one who is living a useful life? Such a person should not be such a wet about the dying aspect of it. It’s only death, for God’s sake. It will happen when it happens, like a beating from a prefect, so best get over it and move on.

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