Thursday, January 31, 2013

Mending bones

"You look adorable" said my dear colleague Joanna as I headed to the door. "I don't feel adorable," I said. I had one arm in my bright pink and blue striped coat and my head in its tassled hood so that my other arm, in a cast, could jut out in a sling. Last Saturday I broke the long bone in my arm when I slipped on ice. We live on one of the steepest streets in Toronto. I heard the crack and felt an odd bulging sensation...

Monday, January 28, 2013

Five things I wish parents knew

By Dr. Peter Rumney I’ve been asked to write a brief article to parents who are living with and supporting children with disabilities. As a pediatrician who’s worked at Holland Bloorview in its many forms and structures for over 25 years, I’ve had the privilege of meeting and working with many families and many children with disabilities. I’ve also had my own personal experience within my family with children and relatives with...

Thursday, January 24, 2013

'Just like me—only different'

Michelle Smith, 20, is the focus of the documentary Three Days to See, which was inspired by a Helen Keller essay about what Keller would like to see if given sight for three days. “It uses blindness as a metaphor for how we all lose sight of what’s important,” says Jeff Migliozzi, Michelle's teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind. Michelle was born blind, has Asperger’s syndrome and left her home in rural Maine to be...

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

An insider wakes Wall Street to the disability market

Rich Donovan is founder and CEO of Fifth Quadrant Analytics (FQA) in New York City, a company that helps businesses assess how well they’re engaging people with disabilities as employees and customers. With 1.1 billion people globally, the disability market is the largest minority market, Rich says, but one typically ignored. FQA has developed a Return on Disability Rating that measures how well a business is performing—in recruiting disability...

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Why is eating healthy so hard?

It sounded failure proof: "This made a great-tasting sauce with no extra work," read the descriptor for Slow Cooker Italian Chicken Breasts. My kids like chicken, they like Italian, and doesn't the slow cooker turn everything into a tender, flavourful concoction? As part of my loving-kindness project, I purchased two more cookbooks to help us eat healthier. One is The Complete Idiot's Guide to The Mediterranean Diet and...

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Words that heal

Words that heal “If you could be anyone using that ‘I am,’ who or what would you be?” asked John Fox, a poet and poetry therapist. John was at the bedside of an 11-year-old boy at Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, New York. The boy was lying down, with a breathing tube attached to a surgical opening in his neck that gave him an airway. He couldn't talk. When John and the hospital’s certified child life...

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

A different kind of doctor

I'm excited to attend the book launch of The Memory Clinic tomorrow night. This is the book I referenced in my post yesterday about loving kindness. It's by Dr. Tiffany Chow, a neuroscientist at the Baycrest Rotman Research Institute in Toronto who works closely with people with dementia and their families in The Ross Memory Clinic. It struck me reading her stories that Dr. Chow is able to be truly present with her patients and their families...

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

My loving-kindness project

We bought these candles for our farm. Everything we bought for the farm had a story. We had an elegant, cream wrought-iron and marble lamp that had previously graced a funeral parlour; a 19th century, hand-made kid's bed with ropes to support a mattress instead of a box spring—we bought it on Craigslist and the owner's father had slept on it as a child; an inverted tulip lamp from the set of the movie Kit Kitteredge: An American...

Monday, January 14, 2013

What I learned from Melanie and Tommy

By Sarah Weinstock I was really looking forward to seeing the BLOOM talk called Let's talk brothers and sisters that happened back in November. I knew that the family giving the talk had a daughter with special needs and a younger, typically developing son. Since I have the same dynamics in my family (two daughters, the older one with a genetic condition causing global developmental delay), I knew I wanted to hear their story. The parents,...

Friday, January 11, 2013

In Mary-Ann's 'ark,' diversity is welcome

By Megan Jones Mary-Ann Nova (front right) steps into her miniature jungle cat’s cage the same way as always: holding a dog dish filled with a fat-laced slab of chicken. Her 40-pound caracal Sassi—a lynx-like cat that fells small prey with a swift five-metre leap and a bite to the neck—is perched, hissing, on a platform above. Pressed against the cage, about 25 children stare, their fingers intertwined with the structure’s chain-link fence,...

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Take a look at yourself, and then make the change

A commenter on Paul Austin's response yesterday said that it was clear I had misinterpreted the frustration expressed by some parents. I don't believe I did. I did feel the same discomfort when I first read Paul's piece. As the parent of a child with intellectual disabillity, I have a strong radar for depictions that suggest a person like my son is less than human. When I felt those pangs of discomfort –  the first being...