Who Among Us Is Disabled

A number of years ago, I injured my back and couldn't walk more than 10 feet without having to sit down to relieve the pain. I borrowed a wheelchair and took it home with me. I figured that it would be easy to scoot around through my house and get to anything I wanted to get to. I knew that some of the doors were narrow, and I figured that as long as I didn't mind taking a little skin off the back of my hands each time I went through one, it would be OK. I knew I would be able to reach many things, but after all, I wasn't wheelchair bound, I could stand up for a few seconds and grab whatever I needed.

I remember sitting down in the wheelchair in my living room and heading for the narrow passage way into the kitchen. Forget the passageway. It could have been 12 feet wide and it wouldn't have mattered. It's always those little un-thought of things that trip one up.

I am sure that people who have been here before already know what was going to happen. Never put plush carpets in your house when you are going to be using a manual wheelchair! It was like driving through thick mud with glue mixed in. I never got to the kitchen, at least, not in the chair. Fortunately, my desire for food was a lot stronger than the pain caused by my back which only got worse as I struggled to turn those muddy wheels. Just for the record, I didn't starve. But the experience made me think.

Isn't it the little, everyday things which many people don't even think about, that cause no end of problems. At the Trace Research and Development Center where I work, we design strategies for making electronic information systems such as computers, kiosks, and mobile phones, accessible to all persons, including those who are disabled. We also spend a lot of time helping people design accessible web sites. We do a lot of thinking about whether people who have lost some of their physical or mental abilities can access computer technology like Windows 95, 98, the internet, kiosks, etc. Those are very important questions, but we need to make sure we don't lose sight of the greater problem. If I have to spend the majority of my time in a struggle just to do the everyday things that need to be done in order to live each day, I may not have enough strength or mental capacity left to care about accessing a mobile phone, a computer or anything else.

A few months after I returned my wheel chair, I had occasion to talk to a blind co-worker about his daily routine of going to lunch, on his own, to the very crowded cafeteria near our office. I mostly avoided the cafeteria by bringing my lunch, and if I did go to the cafeteria, I went with another Trace employee who happened to be going at the same time.

I wanted to know how my co-worker who was blind did all the little things like knowing what was on the menu, how he found the line and managed to stay in it even though it sometimes curved around like a snake, how he was able to find a table while carrying a tray and not cracking someone on the head, how he was able to find where the dirty dishes went, and so on. His answer was one I will always remember. He said that he didn't go much any more. He said that by the time he spent all that time dealing with the disability issues which I had raised, he didn't have much strength or patience left to carry on a meaningful conversation with the people who were sitting at his table.

Yes, it is important to work on the big critical issues. It is just as important, however, to help people develop strategies which make it easier to do the little, everyday things more efficiently. After all, if I have to be totally focused on finding my way, I probably won't carry on much of a conversation with you as we walk, and that will be a loss for both of us. If I am so worried about being able to figure out where the dirty dishes go so I can put them there after you leave, I will, no doubt, likely miss some important point you made, or seem quite disinterested in it even if I happen to hear it.

There is a very thin line between trying to do everything on your own versus allowing people to do everything for you. I believe, when you really come down to it, we all need the help of other people to do most everything we do. There are some things we just don't do very well no matter how competent we are in other areas. To put it more bluntly, we are all disabled when it comes to doing certain things.

If it costs a fortune to go somewhere by cab and if the bus doesn't go there, I will often ask any number of my friends to drive me. After all, as one of them said, "It's a whole lot safer than my letting you borrow my car." I used to feel sad that I sometimes had to ask people to go out of their way to give me a hand. I came to realize, however, that people often asked me to do things for them as well.

On one occasion, a good friend of mine asked me to come over to her house and help her connect her new CD player to her stereo system. It was one of those giant stereo cabinets that seemingly had room for two TVs, an amplifier, a bicycle, her snow blower, and her three children. Lost someplace in the bowels of this monstrosity was her stereo system, minus the CD player, of course. Her problem was that her stereo components were jammed tightly into one corner of this beast and to put her CD player in place meant that she had to take out her turntable, amplifier, FM tuner, cassette recorder, video recorder, not to mention all her records, audio cassettes, video tapes, and at least two of the children, just to get to the place the cord from the CD player needed to go to connect to the amplifier. Or, now here's a bright idea, she could call up her blind friend who not only knew a lot about sound systems, but, because he didn't need to see, he just might be able to reach through the little hole in the side of the beast, work his hand around several turns without dropping the cord, and plug it into the correct jack.

It took me less than a minute to complete the job; 36 seconds by her count.

Several weeks later, the same friend's dad had died unexpectedly. She and her dad had been very close, and she was quite depressed. One day, she called and asked if I would mind talking with her about her inability to get beyond his death. Several hours later and a number of miles of road beneath our feet, she said that she felt much better. She reminded me of the day I came to connect her stereo. "And now," she said, "You're back again picking up the pieces. I'm sorry to be such a bother."

"Bother," I said, "If it's a bother to help you out twice within a few weeks, then what do you call all those times I have asked you for a ride?"

"That's not a bother," she said, "That's just something you do for a . . ."

She never finished her sentence. She didn't have to.

We are all dependent on each other for various things. I can't drive, but I am very good with computers. I need a ride, you need to access your hard drive which has suddenly crashed. It all works out in the end. There is no need to keep score. How would you do it anyway. How many miles do we trade for your ability to access your hard drive? Can you ever repay someone for caring enough about you to help you through a hard time? Perhaps "repay" is the wrong word. Perhaps it's more like "friendship."