Things Able-bodied People Don't Consider

I was pondering over the multitude of stuff that people take for granted in their daily lives, unless they have the luck to come across a person who can show them things from a different point of view and wanted to share an eye-opening experience of my own:

A friend of mine, Gertrude, has had muscular dystrophy since she was a young child. For most of her life she was able to walk with braces and crutches, but in the past ten years her condition has deteriorated to the point that she is now confined to a motorized wheelchair that she cannot leave without the assistance of a person physically capable of lifting her out of it. Gertrude resides in an apartment in an assisted-living community, where an attendant drops by a couple times a day to help her shower, use the bathroom, and get in and out of bed— things that most of us do without a second thought. She teaches English at a high school located conveniently down the street from her and is currently engaged to be married, but my story takes place a couple years ago.

At the time, Gertrude and I were in a community service program together and the program heads had determined that all the program participants were to take a day-long excursion to another city to see museums and have lunch, as part our diversity training. Gertrude voiced her reservations right off the bat: the fact that we were going to be in another city for 8 to 10 hours presented a particular problem for her. She can’t go to the bathroom without someone to help her onto the toilet. Since her attendant would be in a different city and she didn’t know any of us well enough to feel comfortable with us going into the bathroom stall with her to pull down her pants and lift her onto the toilet (gee, wonder why), she wouldn't be able to use the bathroom all day. At last we resolved the issue— Gertrude would have her attendant help her go to the bathroom right before she left her apartment and she would drink as little water as possible the rest of the day so she wouldn’t have to go again till she returned home.

It got even better from there. When the bus picked us up to take us on our trip, the driver decided to hassle Gertrude about her wheelchair. Because it was motorized, she insisted that it was a scooter rather than a wheelchair, despite Gertrude’s protests that it actually was a chair (it was a seat with two big wheels on the side-- it looked *nothing* like a scooter), and demanded that she sit in a regular seat, because city regulations state that a person cannot sit in a scooter on public transportation. We spent 30 minutes arguing with the driver, trying to figure out how we were supposed to get Gertrude out of her “scooter” into a bus seat since she couldn’t lift herself, before the driver relented and allowed Gertrude to buckle herself into the special harness provided for people in wheelchairs. (That the bus driver was stupid and had no idea what she was doing was later evidenced by the fact that she did not know how to turn the bus, ran over several curbs, and had to back up into traffic to renegotiate a turn at one point)

Our visit to the first museum was fortunately uneventful. Our second stop was lunch. To avoid a second encounter with the oblivious bus driver, Gertrude decided to wheel herself the 6 blocks to the restaurant with a couple friends, while the rest of us rode on the bus. As the bus driver was confusedly attempting to navigate towards the restaurant, Gertrude and her companions arrived and began looking for a wheelchair accessible entrance. Now, our program coordinators had called ahead to make sure that the restaurant was wheelchair accessible, but they had failed to inquire what “accessible” meant. Gertrude was thus surprised when the hostess directed her to the back alley where the food deliveries were made. She had to wheel around the entire block to get there, and then discovered that their “wheelchair accessible entrance” was actually an elevator that carried food crates up into the kitchen. With some difficulty, the kitchen workers got Gertrude’s wheelchair onto the elevator, which was really too narrow for it—two of her wheels were dangling precariously off the edge-- and lifted her into the restaurant. She was understandably disgruntled while she ate lunch.

I’m sorry to say that neither Gertrude nor the rest of us could avoid a trip with the bus driver to the second museum, which was much further away. Our program directors, in arranging a tour for us, had made another oversight: they failed to inform the museum that one of our members was in a wheelchair. The museum was five stories high, and though it did have some very nice elevators, the tour guides were accustomed to leading their guests up the stairs. Thus, our guide took us up the stairs, while Gertrude had to break away from us, find the elevator, and attempt to reconnect with us at every level, and found that she was missing so much of the tour that she finally gave up and went through museum by herself.

And, as an end to a brilliant day, we were delayed in getting out the city, and it ended up being an entire 11 hours before Gertrude could get home to use the bathroom. I can’t imagine how her bladder held out!

I was wondering if any USMers could share similar stories?

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