Sometimes I think about how media does us a disservice by only showing a very narrow concept of illness and disability.

Like, Tumblr has laughed at people who thought 'the potato sweats' was something everyone goes through, but that's because that's not normal for you. The only kind of allergies that ever get talked about in movies and TV shows are the severe, immediately life-threatening kind, where your throat closes up and you'll be dead in ten minutes if you don't get an Epi-pen to the thigh. So why would you assume that getting sweaty is an allergic response?

I've talked about the fact that I have a histamine issue before. It's likely MCAS. It's functionally like being mildly to moderately allergic to basically the whole world. I've had low key symptoms at least since early high school (year 7/age 12) onwards. And for years, I just thought I got a lot of colds. Just basically constantly. It couldn't be hayfever, I thought; my family get hayfever, and it happens in spring. Mine was year round.

I was in my mid-twenties when I was diagnosed as having 'non-season-specific hayfever'. I didn't work out histamine intolerance for myself until a couple of years ago (a decade or so later), when a member of disability Twitter talked about having MCAS, and how it was likely connected to their fibromyalgia, and how it was probably correlated with fibro for most people, if not causative of it. And they talked about some of the symptoms, and I thought, huh. I tried a bioflavonoid called quercetin in supplement form (one of the treatments they mentioned), and was able to breathe through my nose without difficulty for the first time in literal years. And I'd been taking two different antihistamines daily for several years at this point.

My sister has started looking into MCAS a little herself, and I put together some resources and links of places to find more information. I wound up reading the SIGHI (Swiss Interest Group Histamine Intolerance) symptoms list, and here's some of the random shit this 'pseudoallergic' condition can cause:

bacterial bladder infection symptoms without the bladder infection

headaches and migraines

fatigue

temporary loss of the sense of smell

heartburn

acid reflux

Before I changed my diet and reduced the amount of histamine-rich foods I was eating, I'd started having acid reflux out of nowhere, on a fairly healthy vegan diet – wasn't eating daily burgers and fries, or anything like that. It was happening near daily for awhile. Post diet change, I've had it maybe three times over the course of a year (likely when I've eaten higher histamine foods, tbh), and nowhere near as badly as I did before.

Histamine intolerance is still fairly new as a diagnosis, so it's not surprising that 0 doctors suggested it. But my point here was that allergies can look like a bunch of different things. One friend's mum didn't realise she was a cœliac until she travelled to Japan and didn't eat bread for basically the first time in her life. She was in her late 60s. One thing her cœliac disease caused was a serious nutritional deficit (I think it was potassium?) She passed out and wound up being hospitalised for it. This is common in allergic diseases, because when your gut's inflamed, it can't absorb nutrients properly.

There are so many examples of public misconceptions of illness and disability, but another one that hit home for me was epilepsy. The only kind of seizure that ever appears in popular media is Grand Mal – the kind with convulsions. So when my boss had an absence seizure in her office, with me the only other person in the building, I did my best, but I had no idea what was going on. My boss was sitting in her office, basically non-reactive for several minutes, and then she was confused and vague for maybe a half hour after that. She'd never told me she had epilepsy; at that point, she said later, she hadn't had a seizure for eight years. Back then, I didn't know there were any other kinds of seizures at all. (My boss was fine, btw.)

And this isn't getting into our usual gripes with the lack of disability rep behind the camera leading to a narrow and inaccurate idea of neurodiversity (especially autism) and disability, leading to things like wheelchair users being hassled because the general public believes – thanks to pop culture – that the only kind of wheelchair user that exists are paraplegics and quadriplegics, and that part-time wheelchair users are clearly 'faking'.

The thing is that yeah, you can always do your own research, but first you have to recognise that something isn't normal. For better and for ill, the media we consume helps set our baseline of normal.

It might be nice if they portrayed a broader concept of normal than they currently do.