Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.

From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we’re expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)

I’d flip between the two systems, I’d have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I’d get a job plan from the dole office, I’d sit through work readiness courses, I’d be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I’d hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I’d be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I’d get a pension support plan. Then I’d get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.

I didn’t start a “real job” until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.

It wasn’t even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn’t need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.

The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.

I’ve been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I’m highly successful in my field because I’m working within my body and mind’s means and playing to my strengths. I’m a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it’s not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.

But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it’s not enough to survive.

But if I work any harder my body will not survive.

I’m asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence… Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else’s greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)

Having had a defecography this is very similar to the encouragement the radiologist gave me…

I’m hard of hearing and terrified of standing in the wrong place at an airport and missing the visual cues to board the flight. Once boarding starts and people start queueing up, I usually get in line because it’s helpful to see what everyone in front of me is doing - the order that they hand over paperwork or get carry on double checked. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to hear the attendant if they ask me questions at the gate because it’s so noisy, so I like to at least feel like I’m prepared.

One time I was flying with crutches and qualified for early pre-boarding because I needed the plane wheelchair (skychair). I sat right next to the gate desk and waited, then I started seeing people queue up so I quickly joined the line, wondering how pre-boarding works when the whole plane of passengers are already vying to be at the front of the line.

I get to the front, the attendant looks at my ticket then after some awkward back and forward eventually I realised they were telling me I’ll have to wait till everyone has boarded to get the sky-chair on. I should have come to the desk when pre boarding was announced. I pointed that I was sitting right in front of them… Apparently they were called my name 3 times over the loudspeaker.

Apparently airports can only comprehend one disability at a time (if that!) they knew I was hard of hearing (it’s on my ticket) but still thought calling me over the PA was the best way to get the attention of the deaf person sitting 80cm from their desk.

So I sat back down and waited for the line to clear, then I got back up when there were 2 people in line, and after another back and forward I learned that they had tried calling my name again about halfway through boarding because they only had one skychair and it was now or never because the chair had told fly with the other passenger because their arrival airport didn’t have a chair, or something, I dunno, anyway I kind of had to crawl down the ailse to get to my chair because in the past I’ve just used the backs of chairs to swing myself along, but the plane was full so I couldn’t do that.

If you’ve been using weed pretty heavily for a while, I’d give it a month T break.

For me the first week is insomnia, muscle pain and brain fog worse than when I’m actually stoned, the second week is depressive symptoms and feeling “dopamine withdrawal” (ie: nothing is fun, nothing is motivating, everything is empty), hyperemesis/diarrhoea, and hypersomia.

It’s not until the third or fourth week of a T break that I feel human and begin to think “this is fine, I don’t need weed, it’s nice, but so is having some time off to be sober”

Or just broadly financially literate people. I only make $34k AUD.

I’m incredibly fortunate that my parents were able to teach me financial literacy. I’m also incredibly lucky that I have the personality type to be happy “slumming it”, almost taking a sick pride in how far I can make a 50c bar of soap stretch to clean my entire body, house and laundry, so living within my means has been possible even when my means is a couch in a 4 bedroom share house with 10 roommates. (some of the best years of my life, which is far from the usual sharehouse experience)

Because of a congenial illness, my start in the work force was delayed and is still partly inhibited. But I made a point to put a bare minimum of $20 from every pay cheque straight into a term deposit that I couldn’t touch. When it hit $1000, it moved into a more accessible emergency account, and began saving up the term deposit again. When things are easy I bump that savings contribution up as much as I can. The emergency fund is now a comfortable 5k, with another 10k in the term deposit, that’s 15 years years of savings. The only reason it’s as much as it is, is because I’ve been incredibly lucky to have very few genuine emergencies that require immediate payment. If I can put an unexpected expense on a payment plan, I do.

There are “emergencies” I have ignored because the cost wasn’t worth it. I’ve had 9 teeth extracted, I probably could have saved them all if I forked out a few thousand for a root canal, but it made more financial sense to just let them get bad enough that I could get them extracted for free at the dental school, since now I will never have to worry about those teeth them (I’ll only have to worry about jaw bone loss).

I’m lucky that I never had to get involved with credit card debt. I didn’t have “the bank of mum and dad”, but between my 60 cousins and 20 friends, I can borrow $10-20 from everyone to cover something big, and pay it back slowly interest free, and I make sure I do the same for them, it’s only $20 after all. I relied on that a lot when I was young and still building my emergency fund, and that’s certainly a privilege not everyone has.

I’m privileged to be financially educated and have a social safety net, but by the living standards set by my country, I’m far from wealthy.

The frustrating thing is that I know this, but because the voice in my head is my voice and has my accent, “of” and “have” sound basically the same so when I’m speed typing I accidentally write “of” and when I’m proof reading it, either out loud or in my head, it sounds the exact same to read “could of” or “could have”.

I’ve gotten around this in my professional writing by proof reading everything out loud while doing a silly accent. Or getting a screen reader to read it back in a robot voice.

But for random comments on the internet, I don’t bother, so I’ll occasionally get a helpful person explaining the mistake, and they’re always polite and I appreciate it. I just wish I knew how to make it stick when I’m actually writing.

Ah thank you, I was using too much logic and failed to remember that misogynistic laws aren’t made from a position of reason.

Can you explain how the pill and IUD are out?

The combined oral contraceptive pill suppresses ovulation, there’s nothing to conceive with.

Copper IUDs denature the head of the sperm, meaning they are no longer able to fertilise an egg.

In both instances, there’s either a no egg, or no viable sperm. It’s no different to having sex while infertile (is that a crime too? Because if it is I’d like to see them try and stop me)

I can see how the pill could end up on the chopping block, as it’s secondary method of action is to prevent the uterine lining thickening enough to support implantation of a fertilised egg, but copper IUDs prevent contraception, so life never begins, and thus nothing is “murdered”

I was struck by a truck in April last year when they turned into a bike path instead of turning into their lane.

I was completely fine at the time, just banged up, I went to a private GP clinic and they did a full assessment and billed it under the transport accident commission (a public fund in Victoria Australia for people injured in transport accidents)

Almost one year on, and what was just a bruise on my shin is still just a bruise on my shin. The blood vessels never healed, the discolouration never went away, the odema still causes pain and I can’t kneel or wear boots, and my shin pads for soccer cause pain (and when I take a tackle shin to shin, the pain is so bad it prevents me from weight bearing for an hour or so, and I walked around on a dislocated hip for 3 months, I have a congenital hip deformity, I’m not a stranger to leg pain)

It’s literally just a bruise, my regular GP has been keeping an eye on it because it’s baffling that it hasn’t healed, but it’s not dangerous and it’s not impacting my life enough that I wish I’d done more at the time of the accident.

But it is annoying, and because I was totally fine after the accident, my TAC claim was open-and-close just to cover the cost of the initial “all clear, just some bruising” private GP appointment. And now I have no way of getting reimbursed for the subsequent “it’s been 10 months doc, why is my leg still bruised like I banged it yesterday? Let’s get a CT to rule out issues” appointments.

Hindsight is 20-20, if you have any way of keeping your options open as a traffic accident victim to allow your body time to show the true long term impact, take action to leave that door open, just in case.

There’s a chance, like me, you will be 100% fine and at most just have a strange new body quirk. But there’s also a chance things don’t heal the way you expect and it becomes a lifelong issue.

Yeah but you probably weren’t looking at a few thousand dollars for shoulder surgery after the accident.

I feel for people in the US, getting hit by an unobservant driver could send you bankrupt if your medical expenses are bad enough.

I literally like don’t even know what you’re like talking about. I literally can’t even.

(I’ve just read further down the various responses to this question, and I’m now seeing “literally” overused in literally every other comment, my generation will literally never escape!)

I heard rumours that the new Stanley cup everyone was obsessed with for a week contained lead (not in contact with the inside of the cup, but still, why is lead there at all in 2024)

Was that rumour ever substantiated?

I’m using sync at the moment, I don’t dislike it but there is room for improvement. I have very low accessibility needs. I have palsies in my hands so for me it’s about having nice big icons to tap, because I don’t have the dexterity to push tiny text links or really cramped hit boxes.

My phone GUI is enlarged and sync is just the first third party app I found that scaled well with my phone, most third party apps work for me, it’s just the reddit official app that really, really doesn’t. It’s unreadable with my GUI settings.

Exactly, I didn’t have a tantrum. I used a third party app because of the accessibility features it offered that the official app doesn’t. I can’t use reddit now, so I don’t use reddit.

Bought a giant 250 meter roll of plain brown butchers paper a few years ago, it was like $45AUD from a wholesale packaging company.

Bought a “celebration” set of rubber stamps, and a few different colours of ink pads.

Now I just cut off the amount of wrapping paper I need, slap it with a relevant stamp a few times, wrap the gift, and voila, “custom” wrapping paper.

It’s come in handy for all sorts of things, not just wrapping. Sewing patterns, arts and crafts, emergency table cloths for family BBQ’s, grab 10 metres and roll it up to take to work for programs (I work in a community centre).

I think this depends where you live, having worked a summer as a trolley runner for blister pack production, we produced thousands of blisters, and at the end of the line half got pharmacy own brand foils and the other half got name brand foils.

Same pills, same packs, same factory same standards and testing, just different ink on the foils. But the pharmacy brands would have shorter contracts so they would only be identical to this name brand for 6 months, then try might get a contract with another factory and be identical to another name brand there.

I know with some drugs (Warfarin is the only one that’s instantly coming to mind) it is important to pick a brand and stick with it because the slightest change can effect the therapeutic value.

For myself, I have allergies so sometimes a certain brand or manufacturing company will use a filler, binder or dye I can’t have. And frustratingly there are no ingredients lists on pills for fillers and dyes.

If you like Sawbones you might also like “This podcast will kill you”, an epidemiologist and a doctor make cocktails and go into the history and pathophysiology of diseases and conditions throughout human history.

Not as classically funny as the McElroys, but really informative and they do a good job at keeping the “disturbing content” to a minimum even when going into detail on pretty devastating illnesses.

For a much more lightweight podcast “You’re Dead to Me” from the writers of Horrible Histories is fun. A historian quizzes comedians on their knowledge of historical events and figures.

Crack open a tin of beans, smash them a bit with a fork. Salt, pepper, vinegar, and whatever seasoning blend is within reach. Put it on top of whatever carb I have (toast, tortilla, crackers) is my go-to.

If I don’t have a tin of beans, I microwave some frozen peas to smash up.

Hummus also fits this niche but that’s not something I keep on hand in the pantry, unlike beans.

My favourite no-cook meal is a slab of semi-firm tofu served cold on a bed of spinach, pour over some soy sauce, spring onion and furikake. But that requires fresh ingredients I don’t always have on hand.

Instant noodles, with a handful of frozen corn, and a Nori sheet from the pantry ripped up in it. Tofu (or egg) if you can be bothered.

I’m on the hunt for a vegetarian alternative to a umami packed can of smoked Tuna. I miss smoked Tuna. (I’m allergic to nightshades and haven’t found a allergy free fake fish on the market)

Another reason the chair looks out of place is because it’s a transfer chair, not a self propel chair. These chairs are designed to push someone, they aren’t designed for independent mobility.

These chairs are commonly represented in media because they are cheap and often the “first chair” a disabled person will get because of their affordability and needing something quick. But they are bog standard and you can’t really get around by yourself in one without more pain or fatigue. You’ll then start the process of getting a measured for a chair that will fit your needs.

Some people only have a transfer chair because they are semi-ambulant/part time chair user, so that’s all they need. But most people who use a wheelchair will not use a transfer chair long term. It’s temporary because it’s shit.

So it doesn’t make sense that someone with an active lifestyle, like a DnD character, would use this style chair as their main aid. Unless there’s something in the campaign, like their main chair was damaged, or the disability is recently acquired, the character is poor, etc.

I think it depends what you’re trying to learn - I’m slowly teaching myself to use Excel beyond the highschool level understanding I have. It’s easy enough to fact-check ChatGPT because the formula either works or it doesn’t. And I’m not to fussed if everything I learn to do is a total bodge job, because it’s just for my personal development, it’s not something I need for work or doing any serious spread sheeting.