scoliosis

And Now a Brief Word from Josephine, the Scar That Runs All the Way Down My Back

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment
FED UP TM Ideas worth ranting about
Hey! Here in the back. ScarJo here. I’m FED UP with the lack of respect, okay?

Look, I’m a long, faintly pink line that starts just the above the shoulder blades and ends above the ass-crack. Yeah I’m real sorry about offending your delicate sensibilities. I moved in when my landlady was about 13 and had had a spinal fusion cause her scoliosis was out. of. control. Whereas I held things together.

I was a lot more colorful in those days. A lot more sensitive. Cut nerves I can handle though. But I’m supposed to accept I’m shameful? I’m not exactly blaming my landlady, who was a teenager at the time, for trying to find bathing suits and a prom dress that would hide as much of me as possible. She was a new driver still looking for an unmarked exit off the Bullshit Highway.

“Would you prefer unblemished and dead?”

Remember, all I am is a pink line, with the tiniest smidge of a ridge, on a person’s back. We’re not talking about a sucking chest wound. Or pus. Or whatever’s wrong with Steve Bannon’s complexion. I’m not asking to be a big deal, I’m not asking for attention, for cripes sakes. It’d just be nice to get out and get some freaking fresh air once in a while, you know?

But nooooooo, I’m a SCAR and I must be hidden. Continue reading →

My FEDup™Rant: The Top 5 Reasons Why Girl Scouts Are Better Fundraisers Than the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s (MDA) Telethon

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment
2 Girl Scout cookies that say I Am A Go Getter and I Am a Leader

If these were MDA cookies, they’d say, “I’m half a person,” and “I wish I weren’t me.”

I’m FEDUP with the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s (MDA) Telethon. Unlike other disability groups, it’s still teaching children with neuromuscular diseases (NMDs) that their role in fundraising is to perform their disabilities and/or be treated as passive props in an ableist play. There are better ways to involve all children. Example: The Girl Scouts’ cookie sales.

z The Top 5 Reasons Why Girl Scouts Are Better Fundraisers Than the Muscular Dystrophy Assn’s (MDA)Telethon5.  Selling cookies is an age-appropriate fundraising activity, just as it was for me as an 8 year old Girl Scout. Versus MDA putting even younger children on television to have their medical status be talked about and possibly misrepresented.

4.  A cookie in hand is better than (more than) two decades of promises of cures in the indeterminate future.

3.  Girl Scouts tell people that cookie sales help girls go on camping trips that are about having fun with all different sorts of peers. MDA presents their camp as one week of certain children finally being with their own kind after 51 other weeks of a wretched existence and no future.

2.  Being a Girl Scout made me feel like I belonged with girls who weren’t necessarily like me – a girl in a Milwaukee back-brace who couldn’t walk much – whether it was by sharing the cookie sales or camping together.

1. Girl Scouts don’t say, “Please buy some cookies because being a girl makes me half a person,” or “Buy my cookies or I might die.” Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

I Remember This: The Girls With the Black Bars Over Their Faces

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments
2 side by sde b/w photos of a young white woman wearing only a Milwaukee back brace, with black bars covering her eyes and breasts. On the left is her back, on the right, she's in profile.

Source: researchgate.net: (Reprinted from Blount WP, Schmidt AC, Bidwell RG. Making the Milwaukee brace. J Bone Joint Surg Am. 1958;40:526–528 with permission from Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Inc., Needham, MA.)

1977. I am 11 years old. I am half-naked in a crowded hospital hallway.

I’ve gotten ten steps down the hall from the exam room where my mother is waiting before I fully appreciate that my fish-white thighs are fully on display.
My thighs are doing their best to walk the rest of me onward. The rest of me is wearing underpants, an all-too-sheer white t-shirt, and a Milwaukee back-brace.
The words, You are half-naked in public, explode in my mind like a bad-dream bomb.
Continue reading →

I Remember This: I See a Disabled Person

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment

Cartoonized image of Ingrid Tischer's eyes in close-up.I remember this:

I am eight. I am waiting alone for the little bus inside the doors of my school, White Sulphur Springs Elementary, in the Catskills. I glimpse a small girl not  far away – tired, leaning against the wall like it was holding her up. Seeing her, I feel a sorrow for her. The sorrow is bigger than me, it blooms out of my stomach and swallows me whole like a monstrous flower.  In the next instant, I see that I’m looking at myself in the reflection of a display cabinet’s glass doors. I am angry at myself – first, for letting myself look like that  – then, for looking like that. Then I know that I will never be faster than seeing is. It can get even me. This means that while I’ll empathize with strangers who feel sorry for me in decades to come – having done it myself – I’ll want them to snap out of it, too – as I did.

I’ve been the only (identified) disabled student in my classes in five schools since first grade, I see children “like me” at this clinic and on tv once a year during a telethon that makes me cringe. That’s it. I have a pronounced lack of images to work with and an inability to decipher the ones I do see.

Continue reading →