Drawing on her own deeply personal experiences, Ania Bula explores what it is like to live with unseen chronic disabilities. She paints a vibrant picture of what it is like to be diagnosed with two life-long debilitating conditions as a young adult and relates the challenges and frustrations of dealing with predatory alternative medicine practitioners, arrogant doctors, indifferent bureaucracies, and well-meaning friends and family who always seem to say either the wrong thing—or nothing at all. As she discovered, suddenly everyone's aunt is a health expert and everyone's fad diet a cure. Making matters worse, her physical torment quickly translated into mental stresses. Relationships became strained, while others, including all-important romantic ones, never had a chance to start at all. Wading through a constant stream of ignorance and lies, in a desperate attempt to find peace, to stop the pain, and to return to a more normal life, she submits to being stuffed with powders and magic potions, poked and prodded, and even &“faith healed.&” With honesty and humor, she shares her journey of pain, suffering, and, ultimately, coping, both to help others gain some understanding about what it is like to live with chronic illness—and to help those who might similarly suffer feel less alone, so that they too might start living again.

The Invisible Illness Warriors Health Collective are a small group of passionate young people from Adelaide, Australia living with invisible, chronic illness. This project arose from a distinct lack of resources, visibility and support for young people living with conditions such as ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia. If you have these conditions we hope this booklet provides you with validation, strength and hope. Know that you are not alone and weknow your struggle is real.

Can you imagine dealing with an Invisible Illness that causes you great pain 24/7? I'm pretty sure the answer is NO and neither could Aaliyah Spellman. This African American family faces what millions of people are going through, a sickness in the family. You go from having a normal routine life to everything crashing down in seconds. It can be quite devastating and left with grief. I wrote this book for lacking information purposes within our community when it comes to a sickness. The goal is to educate health professionals, families and friends, counseling for other warriors, and lastly entertainment. It's 2020 I want to set a different tone for Short Health Stories. I plan on taking you through a real sick journey. Why? because nobody is invincible.

Featured in The Advocate, New York Times, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and New York magazine's The Cut This is a vital exploration of the ways society overlooks—and fails—young women with disabilities and chronic illnesses Miriam’s doctor didn’t believe she had breast cancer. She did. Sophie navigates being the only black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers. For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar. Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn’t be the only woman who's dealt with serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found while researching Invisible was a surprisingly large and overlooked population—and now, with long COVID emerging, one that continues to grow. Though young women with serious illness tend to be seen as outliers, young female patients are in fact the primary demographic for many illnesses. They are also one of the most ignored groups in our medical system—a system where young women, especially women of color and trans women, are invisible. And because of expectations about gender and age, young women with health issues must often deal with bias in their careers and personal lives. Not only do they feel pressured to seem perfect and youthful, they also find themselves amid labyrinthine obstacles in a culture that has one narrow idea of womanhood. Lent Hirsch weaves her own experiences together with stories from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality and inequity, and insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic, Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.

An ALA Sydney Taylor Award Honoree A Junior Library Guild Selection Isabel has one rule: no dating. It’s easier— It’s safer— It’s better— —for the other person. She’s got issues. She’s got secrets. She’s got rheumatoid arthritis. But then she meets another sick kid. He’s got a chronic illness Isabel’s never heard of, something she can’t even pronounce. He understands what it means to be sick. He understands her more than her healthy friends. He understands her more than her own father who’s a doctor. He’s gorgeous, fun, and foul-mouthed. And totally into her. Isabel has one rule: no dating. It’s complicated— It’s dangerous— It’s never felt better— —to consider breaking that rule for him.

It has often been maintained that young children's knowledge is limited to perceptual appearances. In this "preoperational" stage of development, there are profound conceptual limitations in that they have little understanding of numerical and causal relations and are incapable of insight into the minds of others. Their apparent inability to perform well on traditional developmental measures has led researchers to accept a model of the young child as plagued by conceptual deficits. These ideas have had a major impact on educational programs. Many have accepted the view that the young are not ready for instruction and that their memory and understanding is vulnerable to distortion, especially in subjects such as mathematics and science. However, the second edition of this book provides further evidence that children's stage-like performance can frequently be reinterpreted in terms of a clash between the conversational worlds of adults and children. In many settings, children may not share an adult's well-meaning purpose or use of words in questioning. Under these conditions, they do not disclose the depth of their memory and understanding and may respond incorrectly even when they are certain of the right answer. In this light, a different model of development emerges with significant implications for instruction in educational, health, and legal settings. It attributes more competence to young children than is frequently recognized and reflects the position that development in evolutionarily important domains is guided by implicit constraints on learning. It proposes that attention to young children's conversational experience is a powerful means to illustrate what they know.

This story of a mother and daughter helps to gently reassure little ones (0 to 3 years old) that a parent's struggles with a chronic "invisible" illness does not mean they are loved any less.

Everyone has experienced pain at one point or another, but disorders such as fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis cause severe, long-term pain that can greatly limit a person's everyday activities. Because the cause of this pain is not visible, many people do not fully understand these disorders. This volume dispels the myths surrounding chronic pain to give readers a better understanding of the daily struggles people who suffer from it face. Informative sidebars and detailed infographics help young adults learn how to support a loved one who is dealing with an invisible illness or cope with their own chronic pain diagnosis.

Family is everything, but when my baby sister was diagnosed with Cancer, I felt alone, scared, invisible. I want to share my story. A book for all the warrior children and the siblings who feel lost and confused on the sidelines. Stay strong! You are not alone. You are not invisible.