My dad was disabled, and cooler than most

By Louise Kinross Earlier this month Bill Peace, a visiting professor at Syracuse University, disability advocate and author of the blog Bad Cripple, posted a moving piece by his son Tom about growing up with a father who uses a wheelchair. Tom, now 23, has a degree in political science and plans to pursue a Master’s degree in prosthetics. Here he is with his dad in earlier days, and below at university graduation. We asked him some questions...

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BLOOM media roundup

Looking for a read or video that will make you think? Check out these disability, health and parenting stories we've collected recently. If we missed a good one, please post the link in the comments. Parents of a disabled child have to save for three The Globe and Mail According to a University of Calgary study, 24-7 support for an adult with autism or other disability costs over $158,000 a year, and has been underestimated. 'What...

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Christmas cards flood in for hospitalized girl

Here’s a heartwarming story about Holland Bloorview inpatient Evelynn Nichols, 9, from Kathy Gravel, social worker on our brain injury unit. Evelynn, wearing her bravery beads, is pictured above with dad Stephen. Nadine Pigeon is telling me that her daughter Evelynn is receiving Christmas cards from all over the world as we speak. A volunteer parent in her Chatham hometown’s school lunch program heard about Evelynn’s severe stroke in September,...

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Making a tree is as fun as buying one, and more kid-friendly

Susan Cosgrove's two-year-old son has autism and isn't ready for a real Christmas tree this year.  "It was a safety issue as far as him pulling it over or climbing on it, as well as the choking hazard of him reaching the lights and small, breakable ornaments," she writes. "It was also a sensory and impulse-control thing as far as touching and removing the ornaments. He's already pulled half the stickers off of this one but I bought about...

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NHS failed to probe unexpected deaths in disabled patients

By Louise Kinross Earlier this year I hung up the phone with Sara Ryan, mom to Connor Sparrowhawk (above right) an 18-year-old with autism and an intellectual disability who drowned after having a seizure in a bath in a National Health Services mental health unit in Oxfordshire, England in 2013. I felt sick. Despite telling hospital staff that her son had epilepsy and was having seizures as a patient, he was left unsupervised in the bath....

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Putting autism risks in context

By Louise Kinross Sigh. It’s too bad this illustration that ran with a piece in the New York Times' Motherlode column about antidepressant use during pregnancy and risk of autism didn’t have a bubble beside it that read: “My baby has almost a 99 per cent chance of not having autism.” Because that’s what the Canadian study found. But the way most news stories are reporting it, you might come away only with this stat in your head:...

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Program gets kids of all abilities up and active

By Louise Kinross Igniting Fitness Possibilities (IFP) is a Holland Bloorview program designed to get kids of all abilities active in fitness and sports. It’s offered in partnership with community groups in Toronto for students in Grades 1 through 12. We spoke to Virginia Wright, Holland Bloorview senior scientist, to learn more. Virginia co-founded the program with Kelly Arbour-Nicitopoulos, assistant professor in the faculty of kinesiology...

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'Travelling, side by side, through these villages of grief'

Charlotte Schwartz (above right) holds Isaiah, 4, with husband Seth and Rivers. Isaiah has a rare metabolic disease called Galactosemia, which is associated with speech and motor delays as well as seizures. Isaiah is diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay. "My husband and I were only married a year before Isaiah was born," she writes. "We had virtually no time to just be us before we had this beautiful baby, and then everything...

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The blame game: It's got to go

By Louise Kinross Yesterday we ran a beautiful piece by Keith McArthur, about his family's nine-year search to get a genetic diagnosis for his son Bryson. What jumped out at me was a paragraph about how Keith’s wife Laura had questioned whether she had done anything during her son’s pregnancy to cause his condition. Laura heads our client- and family-integrated team at Holland Bloorview. “Laura has always felt like maybe the pregnancy was...

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'Getting a diagnosis has changed our world'

By Keith McArthurLaura took a deep breath and mustered up the courage to call the neurology clinic.Families of sick children were supposed to wait patiently. The clinic nurse had made this clear eight weeks earlier when Laura first called to check up on our son Bryson’s lab results.But parents quickly learn that it pays to be pushy. And what was supposed to be a four-month wait had stretched to half a year of waiting to find out if Bryson had...

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LIGHTS spurs families to take action on housing

By Louise Kinross LIGHTS is a Toronto program that brings together families of young adults with intellectual disabilities to help them plan creative housing so their sons and daughters can move out. It’s a partnership with Community Living Toronto and was founded by Mary Pat Armstrong, a parent who purchased a home for her own daughter and roommates to move into more than a decade ago.  Yesterday LIGHTS senior facilitator Laura Starret...

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