Oh, the Places You Made Me Go

During my latest physiotherapist appointment, we found out that I can walk a grand total of 68 metres in five minutes. And then I need to take a break because my arms hurt. Yes, walking makes my arms hurt. That is a thing when you use a rollator, apparently.

I was diagnosed ten years ago, but have obviously been alive longer than that, so you can imagine it hasn’t always been like this. My parents enjoy walking and travelling, for example, and when I was younger, well, I had no choice but to go along with them. Today, I look at photos of those trips and marvel at how I was able to do all those things. Walk. Run. Climb stairs. And look how straight my legs were! Of course, knowing now that I’ve technically had ataxia brewing in me since my birth puts a whole new perspective on why I actually complained about all those things (except the straight legs—I loved that bit!)

How Ataxia Killed My Dream of Becoming a Biologist

Okay fine, I’m being dramatic, ataxia didn’t actually kill anything. After many years of studying science, up to a bachelor’s degree in biology, with the goal of becoming an ethologist (animal behaviourist) I decided, in the third and last year of my degree, that it wasn’t for me and applied to a diploma in translation instead of the master’s program in ethology I’d had my eye on.

That switch in career paths happened in 2010, still over a year away from my diagnosis as an ataxian, but I think you can still fairly say ataxia, or at least disability as a general concept, was the reason for that change. Now, I do not regret at all having made it, I love what I do, but I don’t regret either all the time I spent studying science and biology. Yes, even microbiology. However, I am also quite certain that if ataxia had never entered my life I would have pursued the career I’d dreamed of. Maybe I would have ended up making the same career decision and switched to languages sooner or later, or maybe I’d have spent my whole life working in a zoo or animal sanctuary somewhere. I’ll never know.

Let us explore how ataxia threw a wrench in my carefully laid life plans, shall we?

A Letter to My High School Gym Teacher

If there is one thing all high school students (except maybe jocks) can agree on, it is probably that gym class is the absolute worst, bar none.

In my high school, for example, we had three possible “profiles” we could study in: science, sports and regular. We science nerds had advanced math, physics and chemistry, culminating in two extra math classes as well as a computer class (this was in the early 2000s so that class was hilariously useless). For language courses (French, English, Spanish if we chose it), we took classes corresponding to our level in the language.

And yet there was only one single gym class (or “physical education,” as they like to call it, though I was never quite clear on what the “education” part of it was…). Whatever our size, our weight, our physical abilities, we were all held up to the same standards, expected to do the same things and evaluated the same way.

Those Times I Pretended to Be an Athlete

As a child, I wasn’t disabled and there was no obvious sign that I was going to be, so my parents did what all middle-class parents in Canada did at the time and signed me up for extracurricular sports. I participated without complaining (I think? Though I might have complained, that wouldn’t surprise me), but it won’t come as a shock to any of you to hear that I was never destined for greatness in any of the sports I tried. Quite the contrary, in fact; I remember being held back a few times as my classmates moved on to the next level seemingly without even trying. As someone who’d never had the slightest problem in school, these sports classes were a great lesson in humility, teaching me that I did, in fact, suck at something.

I look back on those times now and see that what was taken as general lack of coordination and poor motor skills were probably just bits and bobs of ataxia getting in the way of my “normal” childhood.