Canary Rarely in the Classroom

Do you find it strange that this blog is called “Canary in the Classroom”, but I rarely ever actually write about school? My experiences as a student as my experiences as a person with a newly acquired invisible disability go hand in hand. I first got sick in May 2013 and I started my program in September 2014. After 7 weeks of being in the classroom, I became extremely ill and ended up entirely bedridden for two months. I finished my first term remotely, including all of my presentations and group work. Following that first term, I was quite ready to drop out of the program. I was discouraged and I was so sick I could barely move. Attending full time classes at my school was an impossible feat.  I was vomiting in the bathroom on a regular basis.  I was nauseous, dizzy, uneasy on my feet and too foggy to even speak in class. Staff, faculty and even visitors were wearing fragranced products. My classes were full of students covered in fragranced personal care products, the dry erase markers, the burning sage from smudging ceremonies in the Aboriginal Faculty, the cleaning products, hand sanitizers, scented garbage bags, poor ventilation in areas with computers and printers, freshly printed materials in every class and everyone’s brand new books, highlighter markers...etc.  It was just impossible. I wasn’t getting anything out of my classes because I was literally a fog-brained-zombie sitting in classrooms filled with “chemical soup”, unable to speak, process or think. I was spending almost all of my good mental energy sending emails and trying obtain support of some kind. I couldn’t go near my books, let alone bring them into my home or READ them.  I was fading fast.  It is not a wonder that after two months I collapsed into a health crisis. At that point, I didn’t have an accommodation plan beyond the posters that were put up and the emails that were sent around by the Diversity and Equity Office. 

By the end of that first term, I was ready to drop out and had convinced myself that there was really no way that I could be successful in the program. I had one professor who really took my concerns to heart and responded with a great deal of compassion and took great effort to understand my concerns and also communicated my concerns to other faculty and students. At the end of that first term, he called me to discuss my experiences in the faculty. I was in tears as I expressed all that I had gone through that term and how sick I was. He knew that it was my intention to do a thesis on the subject of ES/MCS and he suggested that the part time program might be more manageable for me and he agreed to supervise my thesis if I chose to continue on in the program.   

Every part of this illness has been one big painful loss after another big painful loss.  This illness has taken most everything in my life that I cared about and in those early months I did a lot of grieving about it. It didn’t help that my doctor told me I was mentally ill. Nor did it help that I was generally met with disbelief and my experiences were almost constantly delegitimized. Switching to the part time program signified that my career goals were radically shifting and that I had to reconsider everything about my education goals and about what sort of work I would be able to do in the future. ES/MCS has literally controlled and determined everything about my life and experience since I acquired it and it is painful to have to succumb to it.  It is like having your free will taken from you and suddenly, you can’t just do what you want to do anymore.  Ultimately, I did choose to switch to the part time program and I also switched my academic focus from clinical to community, planning, policy and organizations (CPPO). It had become clear to me that I was unlikely to ever be able to work directly with individuals and families in a clinical setting. I also chose to do a thesis, which was not a mandatory part of my program, in fact, very few MSW students do a thesis.  I chose to do a thesis for a few reasons, first and foremost I will be honest and say that a thesis exempted me from four classes and frankly, the less time I am in those classrooms, the less time I am going to be incapacitated, which is my number one priority. Secondly, I had spent a lot of time researching and learning about ES/MCS since I’d become ill in May 2013 and it just made sense for me to continue to do what I was already doing. Also, it was becoming clear that I needed to use my time in school very carefully and try to establish some sort of niche or speciality for myself in social work. As a social work student, I have been encouraged to practice a great deal of reflexivity and to consider how my social location and positionality intersects with my experience as a social worker. ES/MCS and the experience of being discredited, devalued - othered - has dominated every aspect of my life since May 2013. Finally, it is glaringly obvious to me that there is a massive knowledge gap in the literature about the lived experiences and marginalization of people living with ES/MCS. It is profound to me how little people know about it, including professionals working in the field of disability and accessibility. I feel like I have had the burden of having to educate everyone around me about ES/MCS and about how to best support and accommodate me. It has been an exhausting process and journey, especially considering I didn’t even really know exactly what was happening to me until my very recent diagnosis in October. Completing a thesis provides me the opportunity to focus my attention on ES/MCS and to hopefully make a difference in the lives of people with ES/MCS in some small way by adding to the literature and improving conditions in my school. I didn’t choose this thesis, it chose me and we are still working out the details. I only hope I can be well enough to get it all done in time.

I haven’t been writing much about my experiences in the classroom because I am either too sick (going to class) or I am just too busy (trying to keep up).  I haven’t actually been in the classroom since last spring! Yes, it has been almost a year, but I have kept a journal where I have written down my various experiences when I was in the classroom. I am going to try to write more about my experiences, both good and bad in the classroom in the coming months.