never not dealing with it. what if it were easier for you to deal with pets than with people ? i can t imagine living without dogs. and what if you went from endurance athletes to wheelchair bound in just six months? you realize oh, this isn t going the way this is my life, you know? how would you cope? tonight we ll meet three people who overcame their odds by doing something that you might think is a joke. we re setting out on a strange trip. but stick with us. it s all about to make sense. think back on your childhood for a moment. do you remember the first time you saw mickey? how excited you were on your face? do you remember watching cartoons as a kid and the happiness that brought you entire industries have been built on this. on having kids experienced this magic. but what if you never grew out of that feeling? there are people whose affinity for animal characters never went away. people like lindsey. you okay? you sure? yes the first thing i notice about her is that
i m just over doing things just kept getting tired around here, and i couldn t figure out why you got sick and then i got sick. i started having fevers constantly, and i started having seizures, and a lot of seizures got to the point to where i was having 567 you know, 10 seizures a day. after several hospitalizations, alison was finally given multiple diagnoses. they re like, yeah, it s lupus. and then he said, you have a rare genetic mutation called earlier standoff syndrome. due to the complexity of these overlapping conditions , there are no effective treatment options available. how often do you think about the fact that you re sick? there are days where i get up, and i m like, i don t have a lot of energy today. maybe i m just gonna wear pajamas because i m tired, and i m probably gonna sleep half the day. it s a situation she might find unbearable without her boyfriend, john. here s your coffee. oh, thank you. for the past two years, he has been her rock. but john wasn t the onl
alison machida is a way to transport herself back in time and the mouth moves to oh, me face to face with another furry. still feels pretty surreal. but for alison, it s completely normal. putting that hat on. it s like i become a shada. do you talk as a shada? sometimes it just depends on what it is that i m doing. you know that moment. i am not the sick person in the wheelchair. it s a very releasing feeling. pattern er. i love it. okay? alison found more than just a hobby in the free world experience. first suit makers can bring in up to $10,000 a suit though alison is just a beginner. her business is already booming. within a month. i had worked pegged out through most of this year. now, at this
events as sean that s the goal. to keep stepping forward because it is a progression of how i work on myself. and how i ve been fighting my anxiety. is that why you did the panel? yeah. i have all these experience. i got to do something with it. and it s better to pour positive out in the world than just continue eating away. it s a negativity. so this has been good. this has been really good. well, sean digests all he s experienced. alison and john are gearing up for one of the convention s final events. arm first. the masquerade ball. there we are. allison s even fashioned a few special accents for their first suits. a flower crown for a shada and a bowtie and cape for art connects. there you go. our
you their ancestry and how they live, and you know where you might find one. alison decided to tap into her wild side and make a costume of a shada stumbled upon for suits and eventually the furry community. they re artists and writers and just nerds. i really fit right in. she connected with first suit makers online and months later finally brought a shada to life. so what s the red stripe? i had just been diagnosed with lupus, and one of the telltale signs is the lupus butterfly rash. so i decided that i would give her that mark to show that even though she has that it s not everything that she is. how different is a shader from allison? i mean, she s that other part of me that i used to be back when i was healthy, used to be up and running and going and doing all sorts of stuff. i was always exploring and always hunting for different things to do. and i miss that. you know, i miss what i used to be like for