l’azile

(…) may he turn their ankles so we’ll know them by their limping.* a photo by zaziepoo on Flickr.

This morning I had an appointment with a new orthopedist, Dr. Stéphane Leduc, at Jean-Talon Hospital. This guy is specialised in feet and I was referred to him by the orthopedist who managed to fix my broken hip, Dr. Giroux (whom I wrote about with gratitude a little while ago). I was seeing Dr. Leduc about an ongoing and long-standing problem with my left foot, my ankle and my heel specifically. To make a long story short, I have a piece of bone or fibrocartilage callus protruding above my heel, as can be seen on the attached x-ray. This foot has been a mess forever. I broke it in three places when I was nine years old and considering this was in the mid seventies, it is a miracle I can walk as well as I do.

Anyway, the whole thing is rather painful and because of the protrusion, I get sores in that area on a regular basis because my shoes rub against the bump. Now to be clear, I am very limited by the types of shoes I can wear because of the condition of my foot and I wear very sensible shoes. The skin on my heel has gotten so thin over time that you can almost see through it, were it not for the huge red scar covering most of that area. The whole thing is therefore a rather serious risk of infection not mention a pain in the butt, what with having to stop walking every time I get a sore to give it time to heal. Considering the fact that my immune system is not perfect with all the health problems I have had, not to mention all the stress in my life in the last few years, plus my metal implants, a risk of infection is not to be taken lightly.

Continue reading 5%

This is a post I wrote last April 2010 at the height of the whole #a11y vs. #AxS debate that gripped the Accessibility community on twitter at the time. The plan was to chime in, to make it clear what I thought about this whole thing and why I feel the way I do. Note that a large part of the contents of this post were taken, with some adjustments, from an email I wrote to a dear friend at the time. Indeed, I had decided to stop tweeting about it and to write an email, not because I did not want to discuss this subject publicly but because I felt that this was not a discussion that could be well served 140 characters at a time.

And then I thought I should probably commit to collective memory my perspective on the issue and write a blog post about it. But obviously, I never published the article because I kind of got tired of the whole subject and decided to just do my own thing. But, I was called out on this issue again today so I think it will just be easier to post the gawd damn thing and have it over with.

So anyway, last April on twitter, it was proposed that people start using the #AxS (as in “access”) hashtag in lieu of the #a11y (as in “accessibility”) hashtag (see John Foliot’s blog post on the story for more background). My impression is that the primary motivation here was to gain 1 character in tweets. And it seems to me that every other argument was secondary to the goal which, again, was to gain 1 character in tweets. So, lets have a look at some of these arguments[2].

Continue reading a11y cat[1]

You know, I am not even going to bother trying to find a clever title for this post. There is nothing clever about my situation and besides, I am too pissed off.

So yeah, I broke my hip September 24th, as evidenced here. As y’all can imagine, breaking one’s hip is not fun. It is actually quite traumatic not to mention very, very painful. And going through this a second time does not really make it any easier. Well, except maybe for being able to deal more adequately with the amazing amount of bureaucracy one has to contend with despite being in a rather bad way.

Of course, on a personal level, this whole thing has me stressed out because it has, once again, put my life on hold. Besides the inescapable fact that I have a lot of work to do, the truth is things were finally starting to make sense for me. I felt like, four years after breaking my hip the first time, things had finally, for the most part, gotten back on track (because it may not be obvious but breaking a hip is a very disruptive thing). And then BANG!, I break my hip. Again.

Continue reading I broke my hip again