As you can imagine my house has all sorts of rails here there and everywhere - we could keep a monkey entertained for days. The most useful rails I have are superpoles, which are long, floor-to-ceiling poles.  I have these by my bed and toilet to assist transfers.  The pole by my bed also helps me to turn in bed.  I receive a lot of emails asking where I got these from, and the answer is from an Occupational Therapist via my local Independent Living Centre.  If you need rails, poles or shower chairs, this is the place to go.

FA affects the coordination of the arms and hands. I am therefore unable to write, except a little and very slowly.  Typing speed and accuracy is also affected.  To get over this I use speech recognition software on my PC at home (see the speech recognition page), a dictaphone at college and note-takers in exams. 

I would say when I started college - when I was 16 or 17 - was when my speech first became affected, but even now, while it is certainly slower and more slurred than "normal", I don't have huge problems being understood.  My speech only becomes very difficult to understand when I'm cold, tired or nervous. 

I have Nystagmus, which causes rapid and involuntary movements of the eyeball and just recently this has begun to affect my ability to focus, creating what I call flickery vision.  Occasionally I'll be reading and my focus will skip back a few words etc.  Although this isn't really a problem; it just slows me down a bit sometimes.

My hearing is affected, but this is something you would never know unless you took me into a room where there is background noise (in class or in an office I can hear just fine).  Because the nerves jumble things up, my ears mix up messages about what is foreground noise and what is background noise and I am left struggling to distinguish between the two.  

I take a low dosage of a medication called Baclofen which is a muscle relaxant to control muscle spasms.  Because I find that fatigue is a side-effect of taking Baclofen, I take far less that I'm prescribed and I only take Baclofen before going to bed.  During the day - because I'd prefer to live with spasms than take Baclofen and have the side-effect of fatigue - the muscles in my legs jump and twitch.

Accepting all this lead me to making new friends...