Better Living Through Chemistry

Medication -- are you fat enough, disabled enough, or in enough pain? Prove it.

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Hello, subscribers and followers. Welcome to my little corner of Substack. My goal with Reality Check is to share my life experience as well as my professional experience in how to be a person with a disability with finesse. I want to help you advocate for yourself, or for your family and friends. I want you to be able to benefit from my hard won wisdom, which have often been difficult. It is possible to have disability pride and positivity and still acknowledge that disability can also suck. Hard.

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Antibiotics

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

When I was little, my antibiotics would come in liquid form—it didn't taste too bad, and I think my pharmacist, Ralph, was mixing in kind of an orangey flavor. I took it when I got a skin infection, a few times a year.

I only realized in my late teens that Ralph had gone above and beyond for me a few times. One time, the whole family—my sister and I and my parents—were at Disneyland, and I bumped my leg getting into the Pirates of the Caribbean boat. By that evening, I had raging skin infection on my leg. (This was before the days where you could call Walgreens and get a home prescription filled in Anahaim. So, we drove home.

My dad had Ralph’s home number. (When did that happen?) Ralph went in and mixed up the “juice” for meyu, and my dad went to get it. Ralph’s pharmacy was only about a mile from my parents’ house.

The scary thing about those infections for me was that it felt like it spread like wildfire. The blisters hurt and were ugly. Once I started taking the antibiotics, it didn't take long for the meds to start working.

As I got older, I took pills or capsules of a broad spectrum antibiotic, which usually didn't cause many side effects. I always took the full dose.

I was lucky that my mother didn't object to me taking antibiotics.

I wrote here about my mom’s weirdness about medication:

Pain Meds

I wrote about pain meds and my mom in Playhouse 90. I have been very lucky. Even though I drank quite a lot in my twenties—partly self-medicating pain from blisters on my feet, and partly a social group I fell into—I never drank alone, and curtailing my drinking just evolved organically and wasn't a struggle.

Despite some of my doctors’ concerns about me becoming addicted to pain meds, that never happened. It was long frustrating road to get where I am now, which is not needing meds that often, and having effective drugs when I do need them.

Chronic Depression

I think I have had chronic depression since high school. I wasn’t diagnosed until my 30s. I have taken antidepressants since then. There is still such a stigma about depression, anxiety, and other treatable mental health disabilities that I didn't mention my own until I knew I was winding up my career in academia.

I know that there were times I really couldn't function without the meds, and I wish I had them in law school.

It only became clear to me that I was depressed in law school in retrospect. There wasn't much general talk about mental health in the early 90s. My mother (of course) put no stock in meds or therapy related to mental health, so it was never a topic of conversation.

I have since read that a lot of people with physical disabilities have depression and/or anxiety, but no doctor ever asked me about it.

I am Zepbound

I have just gone through a mildly tortureous process with my insurance company to get “prior authorization” for them to cover a prescription for one of the new weightloss drugs ala Ozempic.

I feel like I have been on a diet of varying intensity my entire life. My parents were worried about my weight early on—perhaps because my mother had always struggled with her weight.

So I learned about calories, etc. The trouble wasn’t that I was a compulsive eater, it was that I liked normal amounts of food but I couldn't exercise. Blisters and overheating; no swimming, water is not my friend.

The insurance company wanted me to do a supervised and documented weight loss program—including exercise—before they would consider covering the drug. Even though I am obese by the numbers.

Long story short, I wrote a personal statement that included large color pictures of my hands and feet. I had a feeling that the pics might work because I had to resort to them once before when an insurance company was saying that I didn't need a wheelchair anymore after I had hip replacement surgery.

But it took something out of me, for a while, to have to make the “I am so disabled!” argument once again.

Fuckers.