"Stop invalidating people, stop telling people that they're lying, stop saying what they have isn't real."

Research has shown women with disabilities and deaf women face multiple barriers to accessing health care, including cancer screening and treatment. In some cases, health care practitioners focus on the disability itself as a health problem, and ignore the overall health of the patient.

As a person with a disability, I consider technology an incredible gift. It has opened up the world to me. Like Hugh Herr, the biophysicist who specializes in robotics, says, "Remove technology and I am imprisoned. All I can do is crawl. But with it I am free." Free.

I am hard of hearing and rely on lipreading. Video can be difficult, for a variety of reasons, including camera angle, voice-overs, sound effects, accents, and animation. Every time captioning fails at the movies, I am reminded of my inability to participate in activities many Canadians take for granted. I feel belittled, squashed, unimportant.

While my hearing is pretty bad, I can hear some things and am not considered clinically deaf. I had a CAT scan in my early 20s, which showed that my cochleas didn't completely form. My diagnosis is "profound hearing loss." Loud, deep noises are my friends. I've never heard a bird sing. I can't hear the kettle whistle or the doorbell ring.

I have not always been so blunt about death or talking about death. To be honest, before my husband died, I never said the word. I was superstitious and felt that by uttering the word I was inviting trouble. I did not have a will, afraid that I would jinx myself. That all changed the day my world collapsed and my healthy 44-year-old husband died suddenly. I had to face the "D-word" head on. There was no turning around and avoiding it.