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Home / Thoughts / The joys of wheeling

The joys of wheeling

Written by Sean on Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Coming on the heels of my previous entry which was so bleak, I thought I’d talk a bit about the joy I experience using a wheelchair. Wheeling is not solving my problems, far from it, but it is most certainly easing things up significantly and I find a lot of joy in many aspects of it. This is not to say I don’t also find some aspects of using a wheelchair "no good", but by and large the equation is favourable for me when I use the chair.

Let’s get some of the negatives out of the way first! I can’t run through them all, it would be a very long list, but I need to signal a few because I think it’s important to remember that it’s not all joy and glory, far from it!

• Loading and unloading the chair in the car
• People’s attitudes towards you - too often they patronise you, or ignore you, or talk to you in a very loud voice as if you were deaf as well as using a wheelchair (or they think that you have some damage to the brain too!)
• Lack of curb cuts
• Lack of no-step entrances
• Travelling on the sidewalk when it’s been snowing
• Not being able to reach items on high shelves at the store
• It’s bloody expensive
• Never knowing if the place your friends want to go to is accessible
• Having to plan extra time to get to and from anywhere
• Etc

The list could go on. But by and large, these things are, for me anyway, minor things. They are mostly little annoyances that are part of life, and if we didn’t experience these minor inconvenience, we’d be experiencing other ones.

With that out of the way, I can now talk about what’s good, what’s fun, what gives you (me at any rate) fun, or pleasure (the word "fun" seems to trivialise the experience, somewhat).

First, I feel at home in the chair. A sense of peace washes over me when I’m using the chair. Of course, it isn’t such a wash that it makes BIID go away, but it appeases the edges, softens the blow. This is good stuff, though it’s not so much "fun" nor pleasurable. It’s more about contentment. But I needed to mention it, because it’s a real important one!

So, here are some things that give me pleasure when I use a chair. Some of them are things I did in the past, others are things I keep on doing.

• Feeling one with the chair and managing complex manoeuvers:
  • Turning into a narrow doorway at speed, and sliding in without crashing your rims against the door.
  • Jumping off curbs without breaking a stride.
  • Going from the street to the sidewalk in one smooth motion, even if the curb cut is too high or too steep.
  • Going up or down escalators (kids, don’t try this at home!!!)
  • Reaching the top of a long and steep ramp (or hill) when you didn’t think you’d be able to handle it.
  • Going backwards in a straight, smooth line in one motion.
• The look on people’s face when they realise you’re holding a wheelie during a boring meeting.
• Chasing another wheelchair user around and just being plain silly.
• Grabbing another wheelchair user’s wrist with your hand and spinning around like a merry-go-round, faster and faster until you burst out laughing.
• Coming into a mall with polished floors when it’s raining and you have somewhat bald tyres, and as you go down the corridor, just shake your upper body to make your tyres squeal.
• Zooming down the sidewalk or down the corridor in a mall when you have several people in wheelchairs, all grabbing the back of another one, going down like a human/wheelchair train.
• Going down the sidewalk holding hands with your loved one (harder to do if your loved one is also in a chair!)

Some of these things are pure sillyness, but that’s good to have in anyone’s life! And it’s not an exhaustive list, there’s more that can be “plugged in”.

So, yeah, there’s good stuff to wheeling. Let’s not forget that.

[tags]Wheelchair, Inconvenience, Joy, Wheeling, Accessible, BIID[/tags]