Cyrus The Cyborg

I keep writing out these big paragraphs to explain why it’s a necessity where I live, then deleting them because it’s long even for me. I can literally write an essay if I need to, but the fact of the matter is I can explain it all until I’m blue in the face and it doesn’t matter. My thoughts on my own needs don’t matter. At this point, the opinions of the medical professionals that literally spent days writing reports for me don’t seem to matter either, especially not with all these “reforms” coming in. My OT wrote a report that when printed onto A4 paper was literally thick enough to be a book, containing detailed risk assessments, photos of the environment I live in, diagrams explaining the physics behind why wheel + mud = bad, photos and reports of the closest towns that are not accessible at all and not possible to be made accessible due to a variety of complicated reasons and so much more. And it wasn’t enough. Not to get this chair approved or to stop them from cutting funding to pay people to come out and help me. My ability to go outside was deemed “not enough value for money”.

My LAC suggested if our appeal isn’t successful that I reach out to my area’s minister, as she has gotten involved a few times to vouch for people on similar matters with the NDIS. Sounds great on paper until I look her up and discover that a big part of her campaign to get elected was fear mongering about trans people, specifically in sports. So my choices are continue to bang my head against the wall arguing with the NDIS or I, the trans person and former athlete, can ask the person who spent months demonising and othering my other community. Happy fucking pride!! Even if she did help me, I’ve been burned by “help” from politicians before who went ahead and twisted my words into something to help them get elected before back when I didn’t know how to recognise that kind of behaviour.

I debated even posting this because there’s so many people on the NDIS who are facing way bigger and way more dangerous cuts to their funding than me. When I called my LAC to ask what to do, she legitimately sounded like she might cry because so many of her clients were facing issues. A lot of people are looking at loosing their funding entirely. The state of the NDIS under these reforms is scary, but being able to do things like go into town or even just go outside are not luxuries. They’re necessities. Being able to touch grass should not be a privilege.

Every other page has taken me like a week tops, but every time I sit down to work on this one something goes wrong. Last month it was planned power outages we somehow missed the notifications for. Annoying but meh, that was on us. Then I had a flairup for a week. Then I had to get a mole removed and checked, it wasn’t anything bad thankfully but the wound got infected, which caused another flare up that caused me to sleep for nearly 48hrs straight, then I got better and my tablet started overheating, found a replacement for it until the weather improves, then today, literally as soon as I started working on the page, our electricity started randomly cutting out 🙃

I called my dad (who built the house and did the wiring for it) and we found the cause but it’s not something I can fix even with him directing me, it’s an issue for an actual electrician and he’s out of the state for 2 weeks. We also can’t call a different electrician because we honestly can’t afford it at the best of times but because of the fuel shortages a lot of on-call businesses have had to raise their prices.

On the plus side, my parents house (we live in a seperate house on the same property) runs on solar as part of a different circuit…system thingy (case in point of why I shouldn’t be fixing the problem lol) so it’s not effected by the fault. mum ran an extension cord over so we can steal their electricity, so at least our essentials like the fridge can stay on and we won’t loose our food. But that has to take priority over my laptop or tablet.