A2H #11 | The Other Side of Disability with Elisa Ramos

Imagine you’re a 12 year old living your best life. You’re in cheerleading, you’re super social and you love making friends, but suddenly something feels off. You begin feeling weaker and you literally lose the ability to smile. You can’t open your eyes. You have trouble chewing, swallowing, and out of nowhere, you helplessly fall to the floor when you’re walking. You know for a fact that something is wrong with you, so your mom takes you to see a doctor, but all they say is that you’re acting out for attention. Your parents are hispanic and from a rural community, so of course, they completely trust the doctor and don’t believe that something is going seriously wrong with you.Meet Elisa Ramos, who’s now 29 years old and lives with a form of muscular dystrophy called Myasthenia Gravis, or MG, which is a chronic autoimmune, neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in the skeletal muscles that worsens after periods of activity and improves after periods of rest. In addition, her MG invited two other autoimmune disorders to her life, lupus and sjorgen’s that she now lives with as well. To put it simply, Elisa describes it as her body actively trying to kill her.In this episode, Elisa talks about her journey of being diagnosed with MG at a young age and how finding her voice through writing and painting has helped her to not only empower herself, but to advocate for others. We also talk about how spoken word poetry has helped her heal after being sexually asaulted, and get a behind the scenes look at the daily struggles of living with a disability in Corporate America.Sadly, the service I used to record this episode had a technical error, and the last ten minutes of the interview from Elisa’s end was unforgivably lost. I apologize that it ends rather abruptly, but we talked about too many things that too many people need to hear. .Follow ElisaHer Digital Business CardInstagram : @emramos7________________________________________Enjoy the podcast?Please subscribe and leave a review here!Follow the PodInstagram: @art2heart.podcastWebsite: art2heart.lifeDavid’s Instagram: @mor.intune________________________________________Podcast artwork by Holly Pelletier ClarkInstagram: @themoonstorybook