Note that almost all of these sites raise their money by having you view advertisements, so if you have an ad-blocker on your browser or if you block/turn off images, JavaScript, or Flash please turn those back on before using these sites or your actions won’t be counted!

Games For Charity

Online games which raise money for charities:

FreeRice.com

Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple game that increases your knowledge. Rice is distributed by the UN World Food Program. The default topic is vocabulary but if you follow the “Change Subject” link there are many others available. All of them that I have tried should be accessible to screen readers except the “Famous paintings” and “Identify countries on the map” ones.

HelpThirst.com

A short-term memory training game that gets you to memorise numbers from 1 to 10 digits long and type them back into the game to earn cups of water. Clean Water is distributed through World Vision.

Miscellaneous

These aren’t games, but they’re small things you can do daily for charities .

Click To Give Sites

These sites depend on you viewing advertisements, and some also offer search engine access, shops with things to buy, and other ways you can raise money for the site. I have noted in brackets after the name for those sites where the proceeds are directed to only one country.

The Rainforest Site

Funds the purchase of rainforest land by The Nature Conservancy, The Rainforest Conservation Fund, The World Parks Endowment, and The Friends of Calakmul. These organizations work to preserve rainforest land in Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay and other locations worldwide.

The Animal Rescue Site (USA)

Funding for food and care is paid by site sponsors and distributed to animals in need at the Fund for Animals’ renowned animal sanctuaries including Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch in Texas and the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in California, pet shelters supported by the Petfinder Foundation, North Shore Animal League, and other worthy animal care facilities supported by the GreaterGood.org foundation.

The Literacy Site

The Literacy Site is dedicated to funding free books for children through Room To Read (worldwide) and the First Book program (USA).

The Child Health Site

The Child Health Site is dedicated to funding simple and very effective preventatives and treatments with the goal of robust child health around the globe.

The Breast Cancer Site (USA)

The Breast Cancer Site provides a feel-good way to help promote awareness of breast cancer and provide free mammograms for women in need every day.

The Hunger Site

The Hunger Site was founded to focus the power of the Internet on a specific humanitarian need: the eradication of world hunger.

Cure Breast Cancer

Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the global leader of the breast cancer movement, is working to save lives, empower people, ensure quality care for all and energize science to find the cure for breast cancer.

Children in Need

100% of the donations raised go directly to Children International to help children and families overcome poverty through child sponsorship.

Save the Rainforest

100% of the donations raised go directly to The Nature Conservancy, which has protected over 119 million acres of land and 5,000 miles of rivers worldwide since its founding in 1951.

Save Big Cat Habitat

100% of the donations raised go directly to the Wildlife Conservation Society to protect vanishing habitat for endangered big cats.

Dental Care (USA)

100% of the donations raised go to community organizations that provide dental care to people in the USA who would otherwise go without.

Feed Pets in Need (USA)

100% of the donations raised go directly to The HSUS, which advocates for local humane societies and operates its own network of animal sanctuaries.

Defend Baby Seals

100% of the donations raised go directly to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Your clicks make it possible for IFAW seal hunt observers to continue documenting the cruelty of the hunt, and to keep fighting to ensure we pass historic legislation to ban seal products and end the hunt worldwide.

Rescue Ocean Wildlife

100% of the donations raised go directly to Oceana to save our oceans through policy, advocacy and research. Oceana’s scientists, lawyers and advocates work around the world to protect corals, make seafood safe, save sea turtles and more!

Feed Rescued Primates (Africa)

100% of the donations raised go directly to the Jane Goodall Institute, which runs sanctuaries in Africa where orphaned chimpanzees can be cared for and given the chance to live reasonably full lives in spacious conditions. Your click helps JGI feed these rescued primates.

Stop Global Warming

100% of the donations raised go directly to Carbonfund.org, which supports renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation projects globally that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the threat of climate change.

Violence Against Women

100% of the donations raised go directly to Amnesty International to end the systematic violation of women’s basic human rights.

Protect Threatened Wolves (USA)

100% of the donations raised go directly to Defenders of Wildlife to help stop aerial hunting of wolves, continue efforts to expand wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies, and more.

Save Amazon Basin Rainforest

Click to donate land for free. Reduce pollution for clean air at EcologyFund.com.

Save Western US Wilderness (USA)

Click to donate land for free. Donations go to The Nature Conservancy.

Stop Pollution/Preserve Butterflies (Mexico)

Donations go to helping to plant trees in the monarch butterfly forest of Michoacan, Mexico; through the La Cruz Habitat Protection Project.

A Click For The Forest (Sweden)

Donations go to saving Swedish old growth forest. ‘A Click For The Forest’ is its own charity and buys forests directly, all the legal documents are available no the website.

CYCLE Kids (USA)

Get kids riding bikes, provide PE classes and after school activities.

Food For The Hungry (India)

Funds raised by Bhookh.com go to India's UN Food Program.

SolvePoverty

Funding projects in developing countries.

Land Care (Canada)

Planting trees to help the fragmented forest in the Niagara area.

Cancer Research

Craig Research Labs promotes and funds scientific research and public education in all branches of the pure and applied sciences.

Suggested Home Page

Ripple lets you raise money for charity by viewing an ad a day, or running a web search powered by Google. 100% of money raised goes directly to charity.

I have photographic evidence of my level of carried away-ness:

Giving things to people is fun!

The almost-2 dimensional gold painted “tree” is a gift from a former carer of mine. It was originally snapped up from a florist at an after Christmas sale for only a few dollars and it’s hugely handy for somebody like me with not much space! The “decorations” are pieces of translucent ribbon and keyrings decorations I’ve made which are gifts for people. Here are some of the keyrings:

The other main home-made thing I’m giving people for Christmas is “Emotional Emergency Biscuit Bottles”. They have all the ingredients for yummy chocolate chip bikkies except the liquids, including the addition of egg replacement powder and vanilla, so the recipe is pretty much “add melted butter and water, roll into balls, bake”. I’ve written out the instructions in excruciating detail and with no confusing recipe-speak for the cooking impaired of my friends and labelled the jars carefully:

The labels read 'Open In Case Of Emotional Emergency'

I love giving people things. I love making friends smile! I am so lucky to be able to participate like this this year

- Ricky

The T-shirt quilt is double bed size, it certainly covers my single bed well!

There are 156 places where I have to hand-sew the quilt deck to the backing, plus a row of blanket stitch around the edge to fix the edge of the backing down … it’s about 3/4 done at the moment:

There are 156 places where I need to hand-sew the quilt top to the backing

The best thing about working on a Really Big Quilt is you can use it to keep you warm while you work …

The best thing about working on a really big quilt? You can use it while you work!

(Although it occurs to me that by the height of summer this may end up being the worst thing about it)

I am loving this quilt very much!!!

- Ricky

Step one

Discover there’s a huge brick wall in front of you. Give up.

Step two

Discover there’s a huge brick wall in front of you. Try to find a way to go around the wall. Fail. Give up.

Step three

Discover there’s a huge brick wall in front of you. Try to tunnel under or climb over the wall. Fail. Give up.

Step four

Discover there’s a huge brick wall in front of you. Beat your head against the brick wall until you have a headache. Give up.

Step five

Discover there’s a huge brick wall in front of you. Paint a mural on the wall and plant a garden near it. Live with the wall.

Step six

Discover there’s a huge brick wall in front of you. Realize the brick wall is only “in front” of you when you face it. Continue your journey in another direction.

Which step are you at? Which step would you like to be at? What are your walls?

I’m not entirely sure that all the steps are in order, or perhaps they are in a different order for different people and different events? Some people have said to me that they’d reverse steps five and six, what about you? Feedback is encouraged!

- Ricky

PS
Ria pointed out to me that this bears a resemblance to Portia Nelson’s Autobiography In Five Short Chapters and she’s totally right. I wasn’t consciously influenced by Nelson, but I do recall reading it several times before. And it’s also worth reading if this piece interests you.

Photo credit to homg_its_melanie at Flickr. Thank you.

Wishing is fun, even if I never receive any of these things!

• Visits! Bring dinner. Bring a book. Bring your laptop. Bring news of your life. Or bring your knitting and just sit and “be” here for a while. Talking is optional, but nice!
• Running around for me. Having somebody I could call and say “Could you pick up a blah from the frob shop this week?” is insanely useful. A booklet with “running around” coupons would be greatly treasured.
• Big wide necked vases – the sort you can plunk a bunch of flowers from the florist into. I have two vases but they’re both very narrow and tall and not at all good for florist bunches.
• Adopt a fairy penguin. How could I not? Penguin Foundation lets you “adopt” a fairy penguin for a year!
• Wall stickers. Small stickers that can be arranged and rearranged – things like stars, butterflies, clouds, and so on – would be fun.
• A 3-bedroom house in Nunawadding/similar with a garden at the back and all on one level for wheelchair access (I don’t ask for much, do I?).
• A Mac Mini with lots of memory and CPU power to act as a “backup” computer for when my Mac Pro is being fixed, and also as “bedroom computer” for when I get my own bedroom.
• A queen size water-bed (the second waviest available) when I get my own bedroom.
• Small animal/etc statues for my garden. Anything from an inch to a foot or two high is fun! The Whitehouse Gardens statues look lovely, for example.
• A Logitec QuickCam Sphere Webcam which I could mount on a netbook running XP. Then I’d have a remote controllable camera which could look around for me! That would be very cool and would require …
• A netbook running XP. I don’t know much about netbooks so please chat to me if you want to get me one and we can figure what specs are needed.
• A solar/wind-up radio and torch such as the Freeplay Companion Radio for use in case of power blackout. Actually, helping me plan and put together a full emergency kit with stuff like important phone numbers, water, food, etc. specialised to what I need would be most useful!
• Quiet cat toys. Not ones that will make more noise and drive me mad!
• Scraps of embroidery thread and wool. I can use any piece a metre long or more, for wool. Less for embroidery thread. The only types I can’t use are feathered ones as they don’t knot well. I’d most like bright clear colours of the standard 6-strand embroidery thread.
• Big planters to put in my garden and on the concrete near the garden. Have to be large enough not to dry out in less than a day in the summer sun, so at least 30cm diameter. What I really crave are a claw-footed bathtub (slightly broken would be fine for a planter!) and some of those half-barrel wooden planters with metal banding.
• A Wacom wireless Bamboo Fun tablet.
• A nice set of surround-sound speakers which I can connect to my computer but which also have a headphone port.
• A pair of Sennheiser PCX 450 headphones with noise cancelling technology. Or something similar – needs to have excellent noise cancelling abilities, volume controls, changeable cord, and be of a durable full-ear-covering design. Bose make good ones too!
• A Drobo array for backup purposes.
• A nice manual wheelchair that I own, instead of the crummy one from VA&EP that I use. Won’t be used much but the one I have is inappropriate and hurts in spots. I’d have to choose this and my OT would have to help make sure it’s appropriate and fits.
• Some brightly coloured temporary hair extensions! Not particularly to make my hair longer, just to have brightly coloured bits. Then somebody to braid them in for me…

Aaaaaand lots more stuff I can’t think of yet! Like a way to upload my brain!

1. Get of all medications that you possibly can be off, especially medications which are “rescue” drugs and not taken on a regular schedule.
2. The diet, which is the bit everybody talks about.
3. Preventative medications. if the diet doesn’t help you enough (and only then) find a preventative med which works for you and use that too. He mentions a lot of different preventative medication options, and advocates experimenting until you find a med or combination that works for you.

Personally I think the 1-2-3 are out of order and incomplete for those with frequent migraine or chronic daily headache type pain. It’s virtually impossible for chronic severe pain sufferers to wean off all pain medications until the pain itself is less severe and/or frequent. Or, if we can manage it, the pain is so incapacitating that we can’t function at all and most people can’t afford to take several weeks out of their life to be incapacitated.

What I did, and would recommend to anybody else if they can cope with the more complicated method, is this order of things:

1. Read ALL of the book, every single word. You don’t have to agree with it all, but you do need to understand where he’s coming from. If it takes a few weeks, that’s OK. While you’re reading, slowly wean yourself off anything containing caffeine (tea, coffee, cola, etc.) – this might take a while as they’re likely to cause rebound headaches if you lower your intake quickly.
2. Start the diet, but remember that you don’t need to start all at once. Start with “low hanging fruit” items which are easy to switch out and get more strict as you go along and get used to it. Definitely stop all caffeine at this point. You can start planning for how you’ll deal with the full diet, too.
3. Start weaning off medications – take smaller doses when you take them, try to put off taking rescue drugs if you can, etc. Wean off anything that might cause rebound headaches especially – see list in book. Steady-state meds which you take on a regular basis regardless of pain levels are least important at this point I think.
4. Start journaling as much about migraine triggers and pain symptoms (all pain symptoms – not just ones you call migraines) as you can. Record everything that might be a trigger or a symptom, and all meds/ supplements taken. Keep journaling every day as you go along the next steps.
5. Work up to full strict diet as prescribed in the book, being utterly careful that everything is as strict as possible. Watch for additives in ANYTHING that comes with a packet and keep checking them – companies change ingredients without notice quite often.
6. If you know of any non-food triggers which are controllable, do your best to control your exposure to these.
7. Wean off all rescue drugs, and as much of the steady-dose preventatives as you can manage. Your pain/headaches should be significantly less at this point.
8. Stay at this state, being super strict about the diet and journaling everything you can.
9. When you do have pain/migraine, can you pinpoint what’s caused it? At this point, I got migraines when there was storm front hit (abrupt barometric pressure change), when I was exposed to certain aerosols, and when there was acute emotional or physical stress, but could almost always pinpoint the stressor or weather event that caused it. The feeling of control just from knowing what caused the pain was amazing! If you discover more non-food triggers then work on controlling your exposure to those rigorously too.
10. Stay at this point, ideally, for several months to give your body a rest from migrainous pain and a chance to get less “trigger happy”. I found things continued to improve for several months even though I wasn’t doing anything differently. I think the nervous system needs time to settle and heal.
11. If you are still getting pain you can’t deal with, work with increasing preventative/steady-state meds until things are at a level where you can function. (His step 3). If you needed to do this, go back to step 9 and do it again – your body NEEDS the break.
12. Start to make diet less strict, journaling any food change to assist you. Any food will stay in your system for about 4 days so don’t do trials closer together than 4 days apart. Remember the “bucket of triggers” idea from the book and if you react to a food but it’s one you really like, see if you can tolerate a smaller amount.
13. Find a state where your diet, your preventative and rescue medications, and your pain levels are all something you can cope with. The pain won’t be zero and you’ll still have a lot of food limitations, but there will be a level of compromise that you find acceptable. Personally, I found that I would have been happy to stay on the über strict version of the diet forever, it reduced my migrainous pain levels about 95% – if the price for that was the strict diet, it was totally worth it!

I must admit, “Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13 Program” just doesn’t have the same ring about it. Perhaps Bucholtz was onto something after all?

- Ricky

The content provided on this web site is for general informational purposes only. It is intended to provide educational material and is not designed to provide medical advice.

Because medicine and health-care practices are growing and changing rapidly, some of the information on these pages may have changed in some way or may be subject to debate.

This web site does not provide professional medical or health-care services! Please consult your own health-care provider regarding any medical issues relating to diseases, conditions, symptoms, diagnosis, treatments and side effects.

One day, on an Internet mailing list for people with CFS, I was grumbling that spending half my life recovering from going to see this specialist wasn’t my idea of “a life”, CFS or not. Somebody suggested that I use non-urgent ambulance transfers to get there – I wouldn’t have to sit up, or drive my power wheelchair at all, so it shouldn’t be such a shock to my system.

On the second last day of February, 2004, I finally bit the bullet and used the ambulance transfer to go visit my specialist. The ambulance transfer was brilliant, compared to the usual wheelchair-taxi trip – the doctor let me queue-jump when I got there early, he saw me straight away and the ambulance men waited and took me home again as soon as he was finished. This meant that my total time out of bed was from 1:45pm to about 3:00pm – without the ambulance it would have taken 1-3 hours longer at least, plus I would have had the stress of being semi-upright the whole time in my reclining power-wheelchair, having to drive the powerchair around the hospital to get to my doctor’s, and bouncing around uncomfortably in the back of a wheelchair taxi.

I thought about the transfer a lot before it happened, and figured out how I thought it would be the least stressful on my system. In the end, I got the ambulance people to take my own pillows and cushions and quilt from my bed, so I felt comfortable with appropriate and well-known things to hold up my head and knees and something that was soft and light over my legs, instead of having standard ambulance pillows and blankets, which are – in my opinion – scratchy and rock-hard. And, since I was essentially still “in bed”, with a quilt over me as well, I just stayed in the pajamas that I would have been wearing that day anyway. That helped even more with the exhaustion because I didn’t have to extend my out-of-bed time by getting dressed before I went, and undressed when I got back, which is very hard even with a carer to help me – and there isn’t always a carer around.

I think that using my own pillows and covers was a very good move on my part because I didn’t have anything right beside my skin that I wasn’t used to and I wasn’t breathing in strange chemicals from unknown detergents and cleaners used to wash or sterilise the bedding or pillows. Sure, there was still some weird chemical smells around in the ambulance – I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody with severe MCS who can’t deal with a regular car trip – but for somebody like me with few inhalant allergies, it was better than I could have hoped for.

Oh, and I saved the $15 that a half-price taxi would have cost me too! I think that’s quite ironic, given that the net cost of an ambulance is way more for the government, that my portion is less!

I would say that the difference, health-wise, is that recovering from the ambulance trip takes me a bit less than a week, whereas recovering from the wheelchair-taxi version of the same trip usually takes nearly a month! It can even take longer if the taxi people really mess up – like the time when the taxi driver strapped me in wrong and I came within a fraction of a second of being hurled through the back window of a moving taxi!

Ambulance transfers work like this – on a stretcher but in a non-urgent “transfer” ambulance – have to be organised by your doctor or his receptionist. If you have a health-care or pension card, or if you’re an ambulance member, then it’s totally free of charge. If the doctor can see you right away, then you will stay on the ambulance stretcher all the time and the same crew will usually take you back; but if the crew can’t wait they’ll move you onto a bed in the doctor’s surgery and then another ambulance team puts you onto another stretcher for the return journey.

In conclusion, I very highly recommend this route of travel to anybody in the “very severe” category of CFS – for example people who usually would not travel outside the house, but absolutely have to go to see a doctor.

How do you get the form to fill in for all this lovely magic to occur? Just phone the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on 13 23 26 and request the form to become a general postal voter.

Here’s the technical bit. To be a general postal voter (that’s what it’s called) you have to be able to say that one of a list of statements is true. For people with CFS the statement:

3) I am not a patient in a hospital, but due to serious illness or infirmity I am unable to travel from my residence to a polling place.

is true – I spoke with the AEC person who answered the phone and she said that if a visit to a polling place would be enough to make you sicker or in CFS terms put you into a crash, even for a day or two, that is enough that this category applies to you.

For carers the statement to tick would be:

4) I am an elector who is unable to attend a polling place because I am caring for a seriously ill or infirm person who is not in a hospital.

Having filled in the form all you have to do is post it back (an envelope with stamp is helpfully provided) and in about 10 days you’ll get a statement that says you’re on the list. Then the only tricky bit is remembering to update your address with the AEC every time you move house or your postal vote will go sadly astray. The form to update your address you can get from any post office or by ringing the same number – you use the same form as everybody else does to update your address, there’s no special form needed for general postal voters to change their addresses.

Happy Postal Voting!

My ‘Surviving CFS’ series of articles pointed out resources specifically helpful for those in the local area:

• Chronic Financial Stress – about some of the “money tricks” that can help you keep the wolf from the door.
• Getting Help – Practical – Things not included in the above articles, like where to go to get a disabled parking permit, or to get a person from the local council to help you with the vacuuming.

Other articles on slightly more specialised topics have included:

• The Voice Amplifier Story – my experience of discovering, learning about and finally obtaining a voice amplifier to help my weak voice.
• Ambulance Transfers – Another Option Travel to and from a doctor can be very stressful when you have severe CFS. If your doctor cooperates, travelling by non-urgent ambulance, on a stretcher, may be an option. Here are some of my experiences with it.
• General Postal Voter Registration – How to register yourself and your carer(s) to vote from home in State and Federal elections, and why it’s a good idea.
• Talking Books – A Useful Resource – Talks about what talking books are, and where Victorians can get them from.
• The Victorian Aids And Equipment Program – Need a wheelchair but can’t afford it? What the VA&EP is for, and how to access it.