Disability Memoir

Lucy Edwards is a UK-based blind broadcaster, content creator, Pantene Ambassador and disability activist. At only 17 her world went to black. In an instant Lucy lost her eyesight due to a rare condition called Incontinentia Pigmenti. She had to learn how to navigate her life all over again, the beginning of an extraordinary journey to find self-acceptance and happiness. Lucy took to the internet and started to upload her experiences. Through sharing her day-to-day routine in her viral 'How does a blind girl?' video series, Lucy's story gripped the nation.

At the age of 27, Whitney Dafoe was forced to give up his life as a photographer who traveled the world. Bit by bit a mysterious illness stole away the pieces of his life: First, it took the strength of his legs, then his voice, and his ability to eat. The Puzzle Solver follows several years in which he desperately sought answers. Whitney's father, Ron Davis, PhD, a world-class geneticist at Stanford University whose legendary research helped crack the code of DNA, suddenly changed the course of his career in a race against time to cure his son's debilitating condition.

Learning to adapt to life after being diagnosed with chronic pain and illness is extremely difficult. Life as you knew it, along with your hopes and dreams for your life, literally gets turned upside down in an instant. This comes with a lot of deep complicated emotions from grief, sadness, anger, frustration to living in a constant state of uncertainty and stress. Most people assume that if you get sick, a medical professional like Dr. House will work endlessly until they have answers and a cure so you can go back to living the life you used to know.

In The Maniac with No Knees, Tyler Kania takes listeners on a raw, unfiltered ride through his journey with undiagnosed Bipolar I Disorder. From rugby fields to the edge of the Grand Canyon, from building a cryptocurrency start-up to coaching a women’s rugby team to victory, Tyler’s manic adventures push every boundary. Along the way, he uncovers a major tech scandal, survives run-ins with the Boston Mafia, and even attempts the unthinkable—before landing in a mental hospital, where he finally begins to heal.

When Jade unexpectedly suffered from a rare condition which left her paralysed and in a wheelchair at the age of twelve, she never imagined that she'd one day meet her husband John and that together they would take to social media to dispel the stigma surrounding disability, one story at a time. From questions about suffering and sex to family and faith, Jade and John speak honestly and humorously about life as an inter-able couple.

Thirty-four-year-old Rebecca Alexander is a psychotherapist, a spin instructor, a volunteer, and an athlete. She is also almost completely blind, with significantly deteriorated hearing. Not Fade Away is a deeply moving exploration of the obstacles we all face-physical, psychological, and philosophical. Rebecca's story is an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.

At age 16, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind. After high school friends stopped calling and a disability counselor advised him to aim for C's in his classes, he used his remaining blurry peripheral vision to pretend he could still see. Feigning eye contact, memorizing common routes, filling shelves with paperbacks he read via tape cassettes, he organized his life around passing for sighted.

Inspirational, humorous, and thought provoking, Noah Galloway's Living with No Excuses sheds light on his upbringing in rural Alabama, his military experience, and the battle he faced to overcome losing two limbs during Operation Iraqi Freedom. From reliving the early days of life to his acceptance of his "new normal" after losing his arm and leg in combat, Noah reveals his ambition to succeed against all odds.

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

In 1895, a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine Hathaway, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her from becoming a “hunchback” like the “little locksmith” who does odd jobs at her family’s home. Forced to endure her confinement for ten years, Katharine remains immobile until age fifteen, only to find that none of it has prevented her from developing a deformity of her own.

At 30 years old Bryan Bishop’s life was right on track: as the sidekick on The Adam Carolla Show, his career was taking off and, newly engaged, his personal life was soaring to new heights. Then he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Suddenly Bryan’s promising future was looking at a troubling schedule of radiation and chemotherapy. But having found refuge in comedy, "Bald Bryan" recounts his alternately heartbreaking and hysterical experience of cancer treatment and recovery.

A young man once called unteachable journeys across America to investigate the lives of those, like himself, who are forced to create new ways of living in order to survive.

Weeks after giving birth, Holly Frances went from being a healthy 26-year-old new mom to paralyzed and on life support—in less than 72 hours. Diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Holly was trapped in her body, unable to move, speak, or hold her newborn daughter. Life Support tells the story of how Holly struggled to overcome the despair, hopelessness and physical pain, to regain her health and get back to being a mother to her daughter.

In 1992, Count Phillippe Pozzo di Borgo, on the heels of his wife's diagnosis with a terminal illness, suffered a paragliding accident that left him a quadriplegic. Forty-two years old, trapped inside his luxurious Paris town house, he was an outcast for the first time in his life. Abdel, an unemployed Algerian immigrant who had been an outcast for his entire existence, would become Phillipe's unlikely caretaker. Quick-thinking, unsentimental, and more than a little wild, Abdel surprises both himself and his employer.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them?

Growing up in Mineral Wells, Texas during the 1950s and 60s was anything but idyllic for Walter Ashby. Due to a misdiagnosis and medical error, his sister Janie went from being a lively young girl to a shell of a person who required their parents’ attention 24 hours a day, every day. To add insult to injury, his parents received another blow: before Walter was six-years-old, he lost 98 percent of his vision, leaving him legally blind.

Henry Markram is the Elon Musk of neuroscience, the man behind the billion-dollar Blue Brain Project to build a supercomputer model of the brain. He has set the goal of decoding all disturbances of the mind within a generation. This quest is personal for him. The driving force behind his grand ambition has been his son Kai, who has autism. Raising Kai made Henry Markram question all that he thought he knew about neuroscience, and then inspired his groundbreaking research that would upend the conventional wisdom about autism, expressed in his now-famous theory of Intense World Syndrome.

Despite being a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the “dummy class” in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition.

As a child, Matt Hay didn’t know his hearing wasn’t the way everyone else processed sound—because of the workarounds he did to fit in, even the school nurse didn’t catch his condition at the annual hearing and vision checks. But by the time he was a prospective college student and couldn’t pass the entrance requirements for West Point, Hay’s condition, generated by a tumor, was unavoidable: his hearing was going, and fast. A personal soundtrack was Hay’s determined compensation for his condition.

Learn about narcolepsy and one persons struggle living with the disease before and after diagnosis. Have you ever woke up and not known where you were or how you got their? You may have narcolepsy. Have you ever laughed so hysterically you fell down motionless? You may have cataplexy. Have you ever been accused of being drunk or on drugs, even though you know you were not?