Link: Invisible illness - 'I'm fed up of having to perform my disability'

Invisible illness - 'I'm fed up of having to perform my disability'

This one really nails the point: non-disabled society expects us to behave in a specific way, and if we don't, then will take that as full justification to abuse us. Thematically very similar to the s e smith article I saw at the start of the month.

(And really good to see pieces like this appearing on Mumsnet, which used to be a really nest of nasty comments from mums with buggys about wheelchair users taking up 'their' spaces on the bus).

To do-ish

So I've got a GP appointment at 5pm, theoretically at their request, where I need to
1) Make sure they're up to speed on the December pancreatitis hospitalisation
2) See what we're doing about the calcium levels monitoring the gastro-team at the hospital wanted done a month ago, but which I haven't been around for
3) See what they want to do about the Vit D deficiency they said they wanted to see me about before I ended up hospitalised
4) Remember to chase them about the wheelchair assessment referral.
5) Remember to pick up my repeat prescription while I'm there.
ETA: 6) Possibly mention last Friday's Impingement Syndrome diagnosis and physio referal
That's a lot to squeeze in!

And on Friday morning I have an appointment with the gastro-team, where hopefully I find out when they'll be doing the gallbladder thing.

And of course they're likely to want the calcium results, so sometime, probably Wednesday,  I'm going to have to fit in a blood test, and I just hope it's not a starving one as that's where this all started back in December!

Link: Remembering the Holocaust

It's often forgotten, or was never learnt, that disabled people were the first group singled out for systematic killing during the Holocaust in Aktion T4, that's something we should never allow ourselves to forget. I was trying to think of something appropriate to write, but Katharine Quarmby has saved me the effort by putting up the section of her book Scapegoat that discusses the T4 programme as her blog post for today:

Remembering the Holocaust – and the disabled victims who died in the T4 programme

(BTW, Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people (Portobello, 2011), is an absolutely fantastic, if horrendously chilling, study of disability hate crime in the UK).

UKIP, you couldn't make it up - number 187 in a continuing series

Latest *headdesk* on the UKIP front is a parliamentary candidate found to have posted online that gays are 'fascist perverts' and 'paedophiles':

UKIP candidate: Gay people are ‘fascist perverts’ and ‘paedophiles’

The article is in Pink News, so their focus is understandable, but I think a mainstream news organisation might have led with the fact that he was posting online in the forums of the BNP's website, and defending the EDL when he made the remarks.

This is someone who has supposedly been through UKIP's enhanced background checking to ensure he's never been a BNP supporter or the like. If it misses something as blatant as him posting on the BNP website, then you have to wonder just what sort of an enhanced checking process they've come up with - I'm picturing something along the lines of those forms they hand out on US-bound flight asking if you're entering the country for the purpose of the overthrow of the state, cos they always work....