transabled.org

I was 15, and the small college where my Dad was head football coach (and that I later attended) opened a beautiful new library. The cheapskate head librarian had this brilliant idea to hire young kids, for like $2 an hour to lug books back and forth all day from the old library to the new. My Dad got me and about 10 of my pals in on it. We carried books back and forth for about 3 days and each got about 30 bucks or so, and it was hard work, even for for young football players.

Well, in one stack of books I carried (the school had a large and excellent school of nursing and it was from that section) there was a book titled something like physical care for quadriplegics and was nothing but pictures from some rehab hospital in Vancouver Canada. Actual paras and quads, getting in and out of bed, bathtubs, being lifted, transfers, you name it, it was in there. I wanted that book! I wondered how I could take it and not get caught.

It stayed on my mind for years, and when I enrolled as a student 3 years later, I checked it out. At its due date I went in and said I misplaced it. They made me pay for it. But not brand new price, because it was old and hadn’t been checked out for 2 years, so for I think $10 it was mine. I kept it untill I got married and was moving out of my bachelor pad in Tempe, Arizona. I sure wish I had it back.

I wasn’t quite that sophisticated at that age, but I devoured every story about disabled people that I could get my hands on. I could never get enough though!

We had a set of “installment” medical encyclopedias. The “B” volume automatically opened to the picture of the little boy in braces. Wonder how that happened?

I did that at that age too! I would go to my school library, (which was fairly large) and read up on wheelchairs, spinal cord injuries, care for paralysis…every time I could get down there, I’d go to a table in the very back and just indulge myself in the book. Of course, I always loved the fiction stories too. But yes, I did the same thing. :)

Ahhh, days at the library, I remember them well. I never had trouble getting my parents to drop me off at the library and letting me stay for hours. Nothing bad or deviant could happen at the library.

You youngin’s may not know about the old fashioned card catalog. I remember the speed and efficency I could research and cross reference topics that interested me.

In middle school, the local library was a manse that had been converted. There were plenty of nooks and corners for private reading.

Of course, the building was TOTALLY inaccessible :)

I’ve still at least a half dozen books in my home that were procured from the library and “lost” and paid for.

This post reminds me of myself as well. I was a fiction buff (and bookworm) when I was younger, but as soon as I figured out how to use the non-fiction sections, I secretly spent a lot of time in the section about disabilities and physical conditions.

It was strange because I had never encountered anyone with those disabilities or conditions before, yet I had a fascination with them, as if I was reading something about myself — yet, it wasn’t about “me.” Today, I realize that it was probably BIID tugging away at me.

I remember a library incident, before I knew what manifestation of BIID I had. The library was selling off some of its books, and I became engrossed in the only book about disability for sale, called “Lisa’s World” (or something like that). It was about a deaf girl and how she learned to cope with her disability and how she is no different from everyone else.

Even though I’d sold a lot of my childhood books since then, that is one of the few books I refused to sell up to this day. Some other ones that I never sold are related to disability as well, even fictional ones (like one from a horror novel where the victim was so frozen with fear that she was rendered completely paralyzed and mute, with no physical explanation).

I wonder who else around here has some library tales to tell?

P.S. Card catalogues were in use sometimes in some libraries, but otherwise we were using DOS-based computers… They do seem a bit more efficient than some systems nowadays, haha.

^ I just remembered the title of the book: “Lisa and Her Soundless World.”

As soon as I had access to university medical libraries I became an avid reader of the Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Mostly I was interested in innovative amputation techniques. The most frequent topic along these lines was methods of creating a functional claw from a badly mangled hand. For example, if all the fingers are lost one can make a split between metacarpal bones. At a time when I was teaching practical chemistry classes to undergraduates, one of my students had such a claw, which she was able to use very effectively.

Chloe: Your comment about how she can use her claw very efficiently reminds me so much of what people say to me about my wheelchair handling… They tend to say that I make it look so efficient, effortless and smooth when I wheel, and how they would never be able to do the same thing.

I guess your comment reminds me of those people. (If you take offense to that, I apologize.)

Gordo: You’re going to have to try a LOT harder than that if you want to offend me :)

I seem to get those kind of comments more often when I’m wearing leg braces, such as at a party meeting new people. Something along the lines of “You manage those very well”. I just take it as a compliment.

@Chloe, yes it’s meant as a compliment, but it’s also quite patronising, and the worst thing is that people saying these things don’t realise just how patronising they are. I’m glad you can ignore that aspect of it. I can’t, not anymore