Wheels Diary Day 3: a surprising insight

Aside from (I hope) getting better at video production, I made a very surprising insight this afternoon on day three.

I forgot to mention in other posts, but please feel free to leave constructive feedback, questions or comments! People are watching these videos and I would love to know what you think!

Good resource videos

Cindy finally answered one of my big questions about the bathroom, I am so impressed with this woman for having the tenacity to make a video that is sorely needed regardless of the potentially taboo subject matter or embarrassing content. Thank you Cindy, for this very informative video! The second vieo is not as high production but has equally vital information. Youtube user ac6txx, thanks for the chair's perspective! Watching you board a bus has helped me some with my anxiety about trying it for the first time myself. . .

Wheels Diary Day 2: Gaining confidence and body ware

On my second day I went back to the curb that I found to be quite steep originally and took a picture. Now that I am more used to the chair the curb is not as much of a problem, but I can see how someone with poor strength in a manual chair could be effected by this type of situation.

It's surprising because the ramp does not look that bad! What is a real serious hassle? DOG POOP! Wheels track dirt right to your hands, and rolling through dog poo would be a major bummer.

and just to give you a sense of how hilly my neighborhood really is: here's one of the streets near my house.

I'm almost certain no one who is disabled lives in the neighborhood.

Wheels Diary Day one: I have wheels!

Last Friday a classmate from CCA gave me a very generous offer. She had broken her foot at the beginning of the semester and rented a wheelchair for the whole month, after the first week she no longer needed it but still had it around so she offered to let me use it for my research! At school this afternoon I made the transition from walking to wheeling, and after only a few hours I have met quite a few surprises.

Initial Reaction:

Goals:

1. only use my legs for the bathroom, driving and getting into my apartment (stairs).

2. resist the urge to break character, especially when things get difficult

3. use the chair for 5 days or more

How to Drive

One of the first things that I wondered when taking on this task was: how do paraplegic people drive? I found a wonderful resource in a website called disabled-world.com which has a huge library of videos as well as a community for people with disabilities to start discussions. One of the videos I found is embedded below and shows a young man getting into a car and explaining how his personal system for driving works. This video, however, leads me to more questions. What does Colin mean when he says he is a T4 Paraplegic? Also, since Colin's system is very specific to him: How do other types of adaptive driving work?

The Beginning

First off, a disclaimer; to anyone reading this thank you and I hope that no one is offended by what I plan to do here or the things that I might say. Please feel free to correct me if I say something that is not "politically correct" or which might be offensive. I am conducting this research in order to better understand something which I really do not understand now—at the beginning—and I hope the experiments I might do in the next month are understood as a mechanism to gain knowledge; not a joke or something I take lightly or without regard for other people's feelings.

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In order to fully empathize with a paraplegic person, I will conduct an experiment on myself by actually spending a week in a wheelchair. I will try to capture my perspective by hiding a video camera on my chair and I would also like to demonstrate some basic actions like using a public restroom, which fully-able-bodied people probably take for granted. I would also like to supplement my first hand experience by interviewing people who live with wheelchairs.

In my initial thoughts about this experiment I realized that my apartment is completely inaccessible. I live on a second floor, with a split bathroom wherein the toilet is inside a tiny room with no space on either side. If I were to suddenly lose the use of my legs, I would also have to move to a new apartment.

I would like to take my chair on a bus ride on MUNI from my apartment to San Francisco’s downtown shopping district and see what it’s like to go shopping in Macy’s and use the public restroom there. I think the experience of using MUNI will be quite humbling because you have to make the bus driver stop, lower the bus and clear the way for you to sit in a disabled space and it pisses off the other people on the bus who have to wait. There is no one to teach you how to navigate this situation, and every bus and bus driver is quite a different problem to work around.

I anticipate that being disabled will require me to expect to spend a much longer time traveling from place to place, and what I can physically accomplish in a day will be quite limited. My arms are strong, but not nearly as strong as my legs and I may find that I am completely out of energy from just going to class. Having to do laundry, cook for myself, shop for groceries and take out the garbage might all become hugely different burdens than they are now.