The worst part of this pandemic has been to be reminded, not just through my interactions with others in the regular world, but by the STATE, that my health issues, while very serious, are inconvenient. CA took people with such health issues off the first wave of vaccines because it was INCONVENIENT.
Having been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when I was 42, I remember what it was like to be healthy. I also remember the lack of awareness about health that could not be perceived with the eye. And hence, the skepticism about it, the impatience with it, and ultimately the dismissal of the person with it. I remember, because there was a person in my life once like me – with children, and a dangerous health condition (in her case, it was her heart), and during that time, I was healthy.
As I find out that people I know without health issues like mine somehow get vaccinated, and I still have to fend for myself and compete against them for a vaccine that would undoubtedly save my life because my condition puts me in a position most likely to die from COVID, I feel completely and utterly dispensable. Even at work, where a scandal about sexual harassment has hit the papers, and before that the marches against racist institutional murders and now racist civilian murders, employee organizations about combatting discrimination are rising up at work – but people like me were not considered, and are not included and represented.
It remains a taboo subject. If you are visibly disabled, you are pitied but people try not to be prejudiced. If you are not visibly disabled, people think you are just plain LYING.
It took a pandemic to allow working from home not to be a privilege conferred upon healthy workers favored by managers. As a mother, a woman, and a person who relies on medicine to live, I feel exhausted and honestly, permanently disillusioned. To be held INCONVENIENT is the equivalent of being indirectly asked to suicide.
Goodnight.
