Disability Memoir

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.

My life has been nothing short of a miracle. A true triumph, even in the midst of adversity. In Deaf Blind Champion, I give you a front-row seat into how my life changed when I heard my diagnosis, and what I did to get through the depression that engulfed me to become an accomplished sportsman, a dad, life partner, son, brother, teammate, and activist.

This is not a self-help book. This is a war cry. This Is Not a Breakdown: It’s a Bipolar Awakening is a raw, rebellious, no-apologies journey through the chaos and clarity of living with bipolar disorder. Caprice doesn’t sugarcoat the mood swings, the meds, the breakdowns, or the brilliance. He drags the truth into the light — and sets it on fire. For the ones who’ve been called too much. Who’ve disappeared when it got heavy. Who love hard, crash harder, and come back louder. No recovery clichés. No “inspirational” masks. Just real stories, hard-won wisdom, and a whole lot of fire.

After 35 years, the author knows many of the ins and outs of living with Multiple Sclerosis. JJ Leander went from a promise of a wheelchair ride toward an early death, to a winning formula for surviving into Old Age that is anything but a quick trip to the funeral home.

In 2004, Mindy begins hearing a voice in her head, someone she calls "Joe," and sees signs everywhere that hold mysterious clues only for her. What she doesn't know at the time is that she is experiencing her first schizophrenic episode. For the next decade, she oscillates between two worlds -- a normal life and a secret voice-filled one -- until she begins the journey of merging her two worlds back into one. Becoming Whole documents her onset of schizophrenia and the subsequent years spent learning about it and how to live with it. It is her journey to find solace.

Autism is the fastest growing and most common developmental disorder. Imagine the frustration and anxiety over taking your child to a team of medical specialists to be told that they have a lifelong and often debilitating developmental disorder with no cure and limited treatment options? Lauren's parents knew something was different about her from the time she was an infant but as she entered Kindergarten in the fall of 1986 her differences were very obvious to everyone around her as compared to other children her age.

At the age of 30, Jake found himself hospitalized, grappling with the weight of anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Soon, he received the life-altering diagnosis of schizophrenia. In this intimate and illuminating book, you are invited into Jake's world, a world he shares with his mother, Laurette, through alternating chapters.

In this unique and exhilarating autobiography, Allan Jones - Canada’s first blind diplomat - vividly describes how an untreatable eye disease slowly decimated his visual world, most challengingly during his postings in Tokyo and New Delhi, and how he discovered and took to heart the revelatory Indian philosophy that changed his life.

Darryl Jefferson was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at the age of eight and encountered many hurdles in life due to the condition. Despite this, he persevered through many challenges in school, work, relationships, and the military. In this story, he takes us on a journey through one man's experience of living with autism and its effects on school, work, relationships, friendships, and many other life challenges.

Sabrina Greenlee was born to teenage parents in the shadow of South Carolina’s Clemson University, and her story unfolds against the backdrop of her challenging upbringing in a family that lacked the means—financial and emotional—to offer her and her two brothers the safety, comfort, and love every child deserves. When she was a teenager, her beloved younger brother, Dilly, died in a drunk driving accident. In her early twenties, Sabrina faced the tragic loss of her fiancé and one true love. A decade later, she was brutally and publicly assaulted, resulting in the loss of her vision.

Tiffani, the author, becomes an intimate friend as you speaks to you about her deepest thoughts, fears, and worries. Her love, strength, honesty, and determination to care for her family at all costs is inspiring.

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching, and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent” and in search of care.

Half a world away from home in 1976, 18-year old Anne B. Thomas awakens on the side of a two-lane road paralyzed from the chest down. Fast forward through a rigorous year of physical therapy to when her doctor gives her an ominous warning: “You will live a long time and be a burden on your family for the rest of your life unless you check yourself into a nursing home”.

A displaced person (now called refugee or economic migrant), aged 19, escapes in 1950 from behind the Iron Curtain with his mother's and her friends' help. He maneuvers through minefields and swims across icy waters and past Russian patrols to reach Salzburg and then Switzerland, hoping to catch up with his brother (who by then had migrated to Australia). He makes it back again, falls in love, but then emigrates to Canada to start a new life, gets to University in Toronto, and is then joined by his mother after escaping in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising.

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.

Blindness. A tough topic to discuss? Not anymore. In this groundbreaking book, listeners will see blindness in a whole new light. In fact, the compelling and entertaining stories will not only change perceptions of blindness, they’ll make listeners forget the people featured are actually blind.

Whether you’re facing your own hip replacement surgery or want to train for something like a triathlon, or you simply find yourself facing extreme challenges in your own life, this book is your guide to putting steel in your bones and doing what you may never have thought was possible.

Told with shocking honesty and in unbelievable detail, Bipolar: A Gift of Thorns is a profoundly insightful memoir that shines a light on one woman’s courageous journey and the stigma of bipolar disorder.

When Jeremy and Emily Freeman’s teenage son Caleb was in a devastating car accident, doctors gave him a 10 percent chance of survival. Fear of losing a child was all too fresh for the Freemans—their seven-year-old son, Trey, had died just four years earlier from a genetic immunodeficiency. But God. In #butGod Jeremy shares the incredible story of Caleb’s recovery, the darkness that nearly overtook their family in the waiting, and the #butGod movement that captured the prayers of Christians around the world.

Inside My Outside: An Independent Mind in a Dependent Body provides an in-depth look into the life of a young woman with cerebral palsy who cannot walk or talk but who uses an electronic device for communication. This memoir covers three full days, from morning to night, in Sara Pyszka’s life, providing glimpses of past relationships, friendships, schooling, and outrageous stories about the challenges of hiring, firing, and working with personal care assistants.