Saturday, July 14, 2007

Kassiane Sibley needs help

I just read a moving post by Amanda Baggs about Kassiane Sibley.
My handful of regular readers already know of my interest in Amanda and her transformative approach to autism advocacy. The story is too elaborate to summarize here. The interested reader will have to drill into the links to know what I am talking about.

Kassiane is another blogger, autistic and a powerful advocacy voice.
She is also epileptic, dependent on important prescription medications and now, due to some social catastrophy in her life, facing the loss of medical care due to losing her insurance.

I just learned a new term: status epilepticus, which means having seizures back to back without regaining consciousness.

Read Amanda's post.

Look at Kassiane's tumbling video.

Check out her blog.

►►►And if you do nothing else, go the the Fordham University link and spend about twenty minutes listening to this young woman speak. You will find her name toward the bottom of the program.

At times like this I wish I had a multitude of regular readers with deep pockets instead of hundreds of hits from indifferent strangers looking for something else. Just this morning I checked the stats and compared entry pages and exit pages. As far as I can tell only about one or two percent of readers even bother to check out the home page before clicking off to another site.

It sucks having the wrong traffic when you need quick attention to a desparate situation. Perhaps the right person reading this will make the difference. I hope so.

I don't want to piss anybody off complaining about health care in America, but Kassiane looks to me like a poster child for a health care system from hell.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

And, if you are the type of person who likes to read both sides of an argument, go to:

http://crazy-meds1.blogspot.com/

to see how she most likely found herself in her current predicament.

As with many things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Hoots said...

"Anonymous," huh?
Right.
This is August 6...it took only three weeks and two days for this message to appear. The site is dedicated to maligning this young woman.
I'll not delete it. It will underscore her situation better than anything I can think of.

Anonymous said...

FYI: K's story is now going around on some feminist blogs (including Pandagon), along with ideas regarding legal options.

I'm so sorry for what she has endured and hope the blogging communitites can help her.

ballastexistenz said...

Yeah, I don't tend to find pictures of a woman's bared buttocks to be proof of anything more than the character of the person who posted them. Especially when the woman in question was clear she did not want said pictures posted. I end up going "Gee, what a misogynist," not "Gee, that woman is a tramp."

Hoots said...

I agree.
Moreover, that first comment may carry an electronic fingerprint that will identify "Anonymous" as a perpetrator of libel or defamation who can be made to face consequences.
I would like to contact a geek lawyer who wants to do the right thing pro bono.