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CMTA Toronto Upcoming Events • CMT Awareness Month • Learning to slow down and attend to your needs • Existential anxiety
The Toronto chapter of the CMTA has regular meetings and events that can be joined remotely with Zoom. On Saturday, September 24 from 1-3pm EST their guest speaker will be Shannon Hardy, owner of Academy Foot Clinic and a trained podiatrist. Shannon will be speaking about foot care and the importance of seeing a chiropodist/podiatrist. […]
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Asking for the ADA Suite
The hotel receptionist said there was a generator running near my room. In fact there was a giant truck with a generator and air conditioning system running 24/7 right outside the ADA room’s door to cool the whole building I’d be in. He said go check it out a few minutes and come back if it sucked. Of course it sucked.
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How long can you afford to hide it?
It’s too much damn trouble and humiliation to explain and ask for a little help or tolerance when hiding and lumping it is how you’ve learned to cope best. That’s not a good psychological place to be in, long-term, and I can see how it’s not going to serve well post-40s.
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Lord Grizzly
Here is one of the CMT-related poems I’ve written. There aren’t many. This was the first and is surely the longest. It’s in the long-line style of James Schuyler, who offered a really fun, liberating model a few 30/30s ago. The title nods to Frederick Manfred (AKA Feike Feikema) who wrote a historical-fictional account of the legendary mountain man Hugh Glass, loosely the basis for the film The Revenant.
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Disease, Depression, and Family Denial
CMT and other hideable/hidden diseases may often be denied by the people closest to you — a potentially devastating, psychologically defeating, and depressing, gaslit reality that is toxic and abusive.
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Walk4CMT coming up on September 18
I will be walking as far as I comfortably can in Muscular Dystrophy Canada’s Virtual Walk4CMT on Saturday, September 18 — which is somewhere north of 20km at which point the numbness setting it around 10km usually gets into a little more active pain, thanks of course to the effects of a relatively mild case of CMT2. To make it perhaps extra challenging, I’ll be four days off the ol’ snip and tuck, but I hope it really will make no vas deferens. 😆 If you already donated, thank you! I am still $45 under my goal of raising $1000, so there is room for more donors.
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BILLYs
Thick sole, wide toe box, big ankle support, and the upper unzips to fold open for easy access and orthotic insertion. What’s not to like about BILLYs?
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The first treatable form of CMT?
I wrote this brief article on the way the SORD gene works (or fails to work) for the Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation. SORD mutations cause “the most common autosomal recessive form of CMT2 (CMT2A1), autosomal recessive intermediate CMT (CMTRIA), and the overlapping category of distal hereditary motor neuropathy (dHMN).”
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All types of CMT are “Axonal”
CMT1 types have commonly been referred to as “demyelinating” and CMT2 as “axonal,” which gives the impression the nature of the nerve damage between the two is fundamentally different.
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Canadian CMT Resources
At some point I’d like to create a page of CMT resources in Canada just to present that all in one place. If you have anything or anyone you think should be on the list, please let me know! 📣
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The Problem with Writing about CMT
I’ve been increasingly irritated lately by US-based CMT-related non-profit organizations that seem to compete with each other for donations — supposedly they drive research for “treatments and cures.” How well they actually do this relative to the padding of their own budgets is a good question I might take up down the line, but you would think they might at least put some effort into writing plain-English summaries of technical material (medical and scientific research) in ways that educate and inform regular people. But no.
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Maybe it will work on CMT..?
It seems the new hope for VM202 as a CMT1a treatment is perhaps Hellxmith’s latest attempt to find a market for an experimental product that has not panned out as hoped.
CMT Blog
Living and Learning with Charcot Marie Tooth Disease.
CMT Blog 