disabled people: … technically yes BUT it would hurt like hell/ruin my day/trigger a flare/exhaust me/be a fall risk/make me more sick AND THEN I would have to spend a day in bed/increase my dosage/cancel all my other plans/spend a week recovering afterwards
abled people: … but you CAN do it
Imagine if abled people were treated the same way.
A lot of people technically can climb a rope to go to another floor. But it would be physically exhausting, it would require multiple trips if carrying anything, and there’d be a risk of injury.
A lot of people technically can grab a pan from the oven barehanded. But they’d get severe burns.
Some people can solve math problems in their head. But it’s time consuming, and there’s a risk of error.
No one tells them to just suck it up and do it. We have stairs. We have oven mitts. We have calculators.
Did you know there is a strong correlation showing people who have ASD and/or ADHD being more likely to develop PTSD after trauma than neurotypical people?
The theory is that since our brains are more sensitive to stimuli that trauma impacts us more profoundly.
It’s still just a theory but anecdotal evidence seems to support it. It also supports the theory that PTSD in people with ADHD (ASD wasn’t mentioned but it’s likely the same) is exponentially more debilitating and they are more likely to be disabled by it than neurotypical people.
So If you’re struggling more than you think you should be? Or you think that what happened to you wasn’t traumatic enough to have caused your PTSD? There’s a reason you’re struggling that much and you aren’t alone, and it was traumatic enough. You aren’t weak or pathetic. Your brain works differently than other people’s, that’s all.
❤
There have been a few requests for sources so here are a few I’ve come across. A mixture of scholarly/academic papers and more casual language articles that provide similar information as those papers. Also included an interesting paper I stumbled on that shows a correlation between ADHD and Traumatic Brain Injuries.
Articles and Papers claiming risks of PTSD is higher in individuals with ADHD
– Emerald Insight (Scholarly Journal) *AN This is a slightly different subject as it compares a subgroup of ASD individuals to the larger ASD community but I thought it was important to include.
Articles and Papers claiming severity of symptoms are greater with comorbid ADHD and PTSD
Please let me know if any of the links contain harmful language or ideologies. I’ve read some in full but not all and even the ones I did are pretty dense so I may have missed something.
And it’s not until the PTSD turns into a combination of life-destroying anxiety and the desperate need for sheer luck to find a doctor who says, “You know, I suspect there’s ADD involved here,” that you get a combo-diagnosis that finally makes sense.
Because I’ll tell you, ADD + hypervigilance? Is HORRID.
Can I focus without meds? You damn betcha I can focus. Knock on my front door unexpectedly and I’ll focus on every little noise or shadow in and around my house for three f’n days.
With meds? I can recognize that the door knock was from the postal carrier needing me to sign for a package. With even more meds? I can go back to writing and focus on that instead.
It gets better—the guy is deaf, and he taught his cat the sign for “food.” So the cat’s not just saying “put that in my mouth,” it’s actually signing
Not only that, but if you notice at the beginning, the cat *gets the man’s attention* as any person who wanted to talk to a deaf/hoh individual would (well, and vice versa IME). I’ve done sign since I was 5, and generally, w/o eye contact initially, you wave a hand or lightly touch the arm (if that’s ok with the person you’re trying to converse with, of course). Generally, adult cats meow mostly to humans, but this cat has figured out that’s not going to work and has adapted. Animal companions! They are INCREDIBLE.
Amazing.
EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND LOOK AT THIS CAT.
How You’d Survive the Zombie Apocalypse – Disability Edition
Because I saw a post that hit my emotional bone with a sledgehammer, and as a writer that wants to do her damndest to to include everyone, here’s how it would work.
For those fucks that say they would just leave people behind.
– You’re blind? Shoot, zombies are loud. You’d hear them a mile away. Added bonus if this is the type of Zombie Apocalypse where everything goes kinda steampunk: give your character a hoover cane that doubles as a weapon. If Ash from The Evil Dead can put a fucking chainsaw on his hand stump, you can put something cool on a cane. Be creative!
-You’re deaf? Have the single electronic hearing aid for miles that can pick up radio frequencies. You hear voices in your head that lead your group to safety, not to mention you could teach others sign language. Great tool for an apocalypse for silence!
– You don’t have certain limbs, or they are perhaps not fully formed or damaged? One less thing for the undead fuckers to bite. If you’ve ever known someone that doesn’t, you *know* that they get around in their own unique ways with or without. Also, see Ash from The Evil Dead example. Give them a chainsaw! Or a turret gun foot, like the Scotsman from Samurai Jack.
That too Not Real? Fine, how about this. Let’s say there’s a disabled character that survived DVT in one of their legs. This damaged the blood flow permentantly to that leg. Now they’re in a wheelchair. But how is the Zombie virus commonly spread? Bites, you get their liquids into your blood and boom, brain eater. What would happen if your blood flow is already compromised and you got bit in the leg by a crawler? It wouldn’t be able to spread. Your disability would save your life.
Not to mention you could trick the hell out of a wheelchair. Give it spikes, a machine gun, you name it.
– Do you have fibro? Are you always in pain? You are an absolute *godsend* when it comes to identifying medications, or knowing natural remedies. You were surviving an internal apocalypse long before the Zombie one came. You’re the toughest fucker in the world by default. Pain and you are old pals. The only difference is now you can physically smash it with a baseball bat.
“You were surviving an internal apocalypse long before the Zombie one came.”
*Slides into this conversation holding mental illnesses like a gift basket*
Anxiety? You already know how to deal with panic and are always noting (consciously or unconsciously) safe locations where you can have a breakdown if you need it. You will not only survive but be the reigning Rescuer.
ADD/ADHD? An adrenaline rush all you need to feel centered and human? This is your playground. You will be our #1.
Depression? There’s nothing like running from zombies with a bunch of other people to get your endorphines flowing and keep you from feeling isolated.
PTSD? You’re hardwired to protect yourself against danger now, so you become Most Valued Zombie Lookout. PLUS, everyone around you now has PTSD from whatever they’ve witnessed in the apocalypse, so you’re surrounded by people confirming reality and working through it together.
I’m not saying the zombie apocalypse might actually end up being a giant group therapy session…but it’ll certainly be to our benefit.
What about surviving with cerebral palsy and you don’t have a wheelchair to help you move faster?
Your legs work, just not enough to run
You’re now the getaway driver who runs zombies over while people are shooting and stabbing
Your friend Delaney took down two with a rifle while you plowed through ten with your truck
Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.
My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.
So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?
(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)
Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.
They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.
Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.
So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.
Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.
Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/
When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.
Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid. The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear. But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.
Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself
And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.
And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.
People need to know.
PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.
That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things
THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.
Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone.
But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do? Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity.
More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.
People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.
This. All of this.
Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.
Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”
I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.
And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.
And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).
But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.
So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)
And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.
I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.
But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.
PSA to all you fantasy writers because I have just had a truly frustrating twenty minutes talking to someone about this: it’s okay to put mobility aids in your novel and have them just be ordinary.
Like. Super okay.
I don’t give a shit if it’s high fantasy, low fantasy or somewhere between the lovechild of Tolkein meets My Immortal. It’s okay to use mobility devices in your narrative. It’s okay to use the word “wheelchair”. You don’t have to remake the fucking wheel. It’s already been done for you.
And no, it doesn’t detract from the “realism” of your fictional universe in which you get to set the standard for realism. Please don’t try to use that as a reason for not using these things.
There is no reason to lock the disabled people in your narrative into towers because “that’s the way it was”, least of all in your novel about dragons and mermaids and other made up creatures. There is no historical realism here. You are in charge. You get to decide what that means.
Also:
“Depiction of Chinese philosopher Confucius in a wheelchair, dating to ca. 1680. The artist may have been thinking of methods of transport common in his own day.”
“The earliest records of wheeled furniture are an inscription found on a stone slate in China and a child’s bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, both dating between the 6th and 5th century BCE.[2][3][4][5]The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to three centuries later in China; the Chinese used early wheelbarrows to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions was not made for another several hundred years, around 525 CE, when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin to occur in Chinese art.[5]”
“In 1655,Stephan Farffler, a 22 year old paraplegic watchmaker, built the world’s first self-propelling chair on a three-wheel chassis using a system of cranks and cogwheels.[6][3] However, the device had an appearance of a hand bike more than a wheelchair since the design included hand cranks mounted at the front wheel.[2]
The invalid carriage or Bath chair brought the technology into more common use from around 1760.[7]
In 1887, wheelchairs (“rolling chairs”) were introduced to Atlantic City so invalid tourists could rent them to enjoy the Boardwalk. Soon, many healthy tourists also rented the decorated “rolling chairs” and servants to push them as a show of decadence and treatment they could never experience at home.[8]
In 1933 Harry C. Jennings, Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair.[9] Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturers of wheelchairs. Their “X-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Harry from the men’s folding “camp chairs / stools”, rotated 90 degrees, that Harry and Herbert used in the outdoors and at the mines.[citation needed]
“But Joy, how do I describe this contraption in a fantasy setting that wont make it seem out of place?”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince FancyPants McElferson propelled forwards using his arms to direct the motion of the chair.”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince EvenFancierPants McElferson used to get about, pushed along by one of his companions or one of his many attending servants.”
“But it’s a high realm magical fantas—”
“It was a floating chair, the hum of magical energy keeping it off the ground casting a faint glow against the cobblestones as {CHARACTER} guided it round with expert ease, gliding back and forth.”
“But it’s a stempunk nov—”
“Unlike other wheelchairs he’d seen before, this one appeared to be self propelling, powered by the gasket of steam at the back, and directed by the use of a rudder like toggle in the front.”
Give. Disabled. Characters. In. Fantasy. Novels. Mobility. Aids.
If you can spend 60 pages telling me the history of your world in innate detail down to the formation of how magical rocks were formed, you can god damn write three lines in passing about a wheelchair.
Signed, your editor who doesn’t have time for this ableist fantasy realm shit.
If your fantasy setting is having trouble with things like “What other cultures exist in this universe and how do they get on?” or “How do diabled people live?” or “How’s gender work here?” without sounding like Your Conservative Aunt Edna That You Really Wish You Didn’t Have To Be Nice To At Thanksgiving, it’s a good sign that you need to go back, not to the drawing board, but to yourself and your real world, and think real hard about how you’re handling those things in real life.
It’ll do you and your writing a literal world of good.
Okay but like
Do we have to limit ourselves to wheelchairs?
Or could we have like, different kinds of mobility aids? Like we don’t have to remake the fucking wheel, but what if we want to? Like a world with cool magic should have tons of magical ways to help people get around. Same thing with technology. Like sure wheelchairs are cool but so is a guy with like, a fully controllable robot leg suit, or a paraplegic wizard who just flies around sitting on a magic cloud they’ve made solid with their spells.
Absolutely not! I used the example of wheelchairs because the person I was talking to decided to tell me that mobility aids were historically inaccurate and therefore had no place in their historical fantasy novel setting. So I went the entire hell out of my way to drag them behind historically accurate wheelchairs. I actually have another post circulating at the moment that talks about the use of other aids and how magic and other things could work as a mobility aid. I just switched to mobile so I can’t link, but if you scroll my blog you’ll find it.
This is all I’ve been talking about today because it’s all anyone will let me talk about lol.
Do you think it’s ok to say “rolling chair” or “wheeled chair” to sound slightly more old-timey and avoid the tiffany problem
Yep. Another old timey accurate term was “bath chair”. If that helps.
yep another old
timey accurate term was
“bath chair” if that helps
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
Just for once I’d like to tell the gate agents and flight attendants that my folding wheelchair is going into the onboard closet and not have them tell me there’s “no room”. Bitch that’s a wheelchair closet, not a “your bags” closet. Move your damn bags where they belong.
Ok, so according to my friendly aviation expert, this is a Big Fucking Deal. In fact, if an airline argues with you about putting your wheelchair in the wheelchair closet or even suggests there may not be room, unless there is already anotherpassenger’swheelchair in that closet, they have violatedfederallaw.
CFR Title 14, Chapter II, Subchapter D, Part 382, Subpart E, Section 382.67, Subsection (e)
“As a carrier, you must never request or suggest that a passenger not stow his or her wheelchair in the cabin to accommodate other passengers (e.g., informing a passenger that stowing his or her wheelchair in the cabin will require other passengers to be removed from the flight), or for any other non-safety related reason (e.g., that it is easier for the carrier if the wheelchair is stowed in the cargo compartment).”
This is hugely important because it means that if this happens to you, you should report their asses to the DOT. Why? Because these statistics are published every year for every airline, and the airline gets a huge ass fine for every violation. If we want to see change, we need to make airlines literally pay every time they treat us this way.
@annieelainey you should share this with your followers! This is important info!!
To my mutuals on wheels, print out the law before you fly and whip it out at the gate if they don’t accomodate your wheels.
Thanks a lot for posting this, bro! Flying while crippled is already difficult enough without people pulling this kind of shit. Also, make sure that if there is a piece of your wheelchair or something important missing off of it, that you make a big fucking deal out of it! I’ve had pieces fall off of my wheelchair and nearly lost a decoration I had on it that meant a lot to me because people were careless with my chair. Don’t let them mistreat your wheelchair.
Non-wheelchair folks:
Now that you know, speak up.
You never know when you’re going to see someone who needs an ally.
I was actually looking for this post the other day for someone who was worried about flying with their chair. I can’t remember your username, but here! this is the thing I was talking about!
I am not confined to my wheelchair. More than half of wheelchair workers can stand and walk at least a little. Quit harassing us when we do. But even for those who can’t stand at all, a wheelchair is not a metal cage or medieval torture rack. It’s a custom medical device that frees us, that allows us to live fuller lives.
I had to fundraise for my wheelchair because my insurance didn’t cover durable medical. While I waited to get a wheelchair, that’s when I was confined. People had to come to me. The only place I could go was the grocery store, because they had scooters. Once a week I got to spend an hour outside the home. Other than that, I was unable to leave the house.
My wheelchair freed me. I could work until I got too sick (but many people work full-time in wheelchairs). I can visit friends, go grocery shopping by myself, go to the park or museum, excercise, go shopping. I can live life. It’s a changed life, but it’s no less full than an abled person’s life. I can’t work anymore, and I need more sleep. I’m in pain all day and can’t visit for long periods. I can’t spend all day at the museum anymore. But that’s my ME/CFS and fibromyalgia, not my wheelchair. I’m not confined. Without my wheelchair, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but sit on my porch.
In truth, the only thing confining me is lack of accessibility. Sidewalks that are more crack than concrete. Entrances that are non-ADA compliant. The lack of ramps and accessible parking. And society’s lack of care. The people who harass me for standing up in my wheelchair to grab a bottle of shampoo. The people who make disability benefits so hard to get. The businesses that ignore the e-mails I send asking for a $49 fix to their entrances so I don’t have to rely on two strong folx to get me through the door. The ableds who spread myth and misunderstanding. When I can’t get a parking spot, I’m confined. When there’s no ramp, I’m confined. When I can’t get the benefits I need to live, I’m confined.
Wheelchairs are not a prison sentence. The first thing I did after my wheelchair arrived was drive (all by myself!) to Home Depot. I bought a set of Allen wrenches for the chair I named Loka and then just rolled up and down Home Depot’s long, tall aisles. I rolled until my arms ached. I did it because I could.
Don’t ever look at a person in a wheelchair and pity them. They’re lucky to have a wheelchair. Could Stephen Hawking have done all the great, world-changing scientific work he did without his wheelchair and voice synthethiser? No, of course not. His wheelchair meant greater freedom; the opportunity to travel and spread scientific learning and inquiry. It meant getting around Cambridge, doing interviews, meeting the public. It meant being a more active father and husband.
Our wheelchairs drive our lives forward, literally. We are no more confined to them than you are to your sneakers.
wupacing 