I’ve seen a post about first time wheelchair users guide. Since I’ve been using a walking stick for a while now, I thought I’d make one specifically for these types of aids. These will be in no particular order– they’re just things you probably don’t know about using a walking stick.
– if you’ve hurt you left leg/ect., hold the stick in your right hand (if possible) and if you’ve hurt your right leg/ect., hold the stick in your left hand. Trust me, your shoulders and back will thank you
– the pad of your hand will hurt– it just will. You’ll get used to it and your hand will develop more protection there eventually. To start out, look into a pair of fingerless gloves.
– a fold up/collapsable stick is good for beginners because you can take them on public transport/cars without too much hassle (they also fit nicely into desks and under chairs).
– When you’re using your stick, you only have one free hand. This may seem obvious, but it really impacts your every day life. Practice for a while around the house, so you get the feeling down.
-there are a lot of different types of walking sticks: fold up, one leg, two legs, three legs, etc.
(these are only a few of the many designs)
-if possible, go to a shop that specifies in walking sticks. ask to try a few out, they will also help make sure that you’re using on that’s the right height for you.
– a height adjustable walking stick is a miracle, especially if you want to wear high heels to an event.
– you don’t need a prescription to get a stick in most regions (but in some cases they may help get a discount)
– getting a stick that is the right height for you if very important (even with an adjustable one). Too short, and you’ll hurt your shoulder. Too tall, and you can’t put weight on it properly. The correct height is when the highest part of the handle reaches your wrist when the stick is standing straight up, as shown in this image.
– if you’re young (under the age of 60) people will stare, often they wont mean to– it is annoying but you’ll get used to it.
– again, if you’re young, people will ask why you’re using the stick, all. the. time. Even strangers will sometimes ask. You can use a really simple answer like “medical condition” and if they pry further, you can say “That’s all I’m comfortable saying”. If they don’t know you, or don’t know you well, they really have no business asking.
-Children will ask, a lot. Please be gentle with them, especially if they’re really little. I know it’s annoying but you can give children reallllllllly simple answers like “I just need it to help me walk” and most of the time they’ll be perfectly content with that and won’t ask more.
– don’t be afraid to use more advanced mobility aids if needed on bad days, or when readily available (eg. at a supermarket, when they have motorized wheelchairs for customers)
– You don’t have to use your stick every day for you to have a disability or for you to own a stick. Even if you need it once a week, once a month, you can still own one. You’re not less worthy or a mobility aid than those who need one everyday.
-Use backpacks, the ones with 2 well-padded straps that go over your shoulders evenly. Use them as much as you can. Bags that you hold in one hand or have one strap make you unbalanced or take up your only free hand.
– If you want to, decorate your stick, go all out.
Even if you don’t need/use a walking stick, please reblog this to let those who do, know this information.
More tips!
-Your cane will fall over a lot if you prop it against things; I fold mine if half and put it on my desk at work, and prop it against my body on the bus to keep it from falling out of reach and making a bunch of noise.
-Able bodied people will get weird when you are visibly disabled; You may feel like people are going out of their way to inconvenience you (People will cut in lines ahead of you more frequently, pull doors closed behind them, move/use accessible elevators just as you’re about to get on, walk close enough to you that they push you, snd generally pretend as though they can’t see you). Sticking up for yourself is scary, but everybody backs off the second you point out what they’re doing. Don’t let them walk all over you because they will, and it sucks.
-If you’re a transit user, don’t be afraid to ask for a seat if you need it! A lot of the time people sitting on trains and buses zone out or immerse themselves in reading, and they will legitimately not notice you get on. It’s better to talk to a stranger for a second than to potentially fall!
-Holding your cane in the opposite hand to your compromised leg will absolutely save your back and shoulders, however, if your leg is prone to collapsing, it won’t really help you. Holding the cane on the same side allows you to use the cane as support while walking.
I would say that the best way to use a cane very much depends on why you need it, and what you’re using it for. I finally started using one about 10 years ago, when I was having a lot of trouble with a knee unpredictably buckling out from under me–and in that case it’s not necessarily going to help you much in the other hand. Also from personal experience, using a cane on the other side made the situation worse with a not so stable pelvic fracture. Also too relevant sometimes, especially with something like EDS and/or a frozen shoulder thrown into the mix: which arm can reasonably handle it right then.
Basically, it’s important to figure out what’s the most helpful and comfortable approach in your specific situation. Where there may also be multiple considerations to juggle.
Just going to repeat this, as much as it continues to drive me up the wall where I’m living now:
-Able bodied people will get weird when you are visibly disabled; You may feel like people are going out of their way to inconvenience you (People will cut in lines ahead of you more frequently, pull doors closed behind them, move/use accessible elevators just as you’re about to get on, walk close enough to you that they push you, snd generally pretend as though they can’t see you). Sticking up for yourself is scary, but everybody backs off the second you point out what they’re doing. Don’t let them walk all over you because they will, and it sucks.
IME, not everybody will back off. Some will get mouthy and/or put on a show of aggrievement. But, they need the feedback anyway, because jfc. And you’re not the one in the wrong, either for taking up their precious sidewalk space or for having the gall to object to literally getting shoved around 😬
Once my friend Henry was accused of wearing wireless headphones by a substitute so she said for him to hand them over so he took them off and handed them to her. Then later on she asked him a question and he didn’t respond so she said it louder and he still didn’t respond. She asked why he was not responding and he said “I can’t understand you ma’am, you took my hearing aids.”
HOLY SHIT
one time we had a sub that was handing back papers and called my name. I asked if someone could grab it for me and she started mocking me for not even standing up. taunting me asking why I was not walking up to the front to get the paper myself.
my classmates went dead silent and after the sub’s laughter ended someone informed her that the wheelchair parked nearby belonged to me
I had a sub in English once, on presentation day. And everyone goes up and does their thing, and then its my turn. The whole time im stuttering and mixing up my words, having to stop and re-say my sentences. The rest of the class is used to this and claps. However, by the time its over, the teacher is 100% done.
Starts saying horrible thing about how im going to have to get over my ‘fear of public speaking’ and how she’s heard 8 year olds give better presentations (plus worse things but I don’t really member them). By then im in tears and on the brink of a panic attack, and then she starts telling me off for crying
The rest of the class is horrified. Then this boy stands up. He never been my friend and we never really got along, but he’d never bullied me. He told her in a pissed off, cold voice that in freshmen year I got a concussion and that I never really recovered from it, so all that was medical related and I couldn’t help it. Then he starts telling her off and the rest of the class joins him.
The teacher is mortified and tries to cover her ass, but the whole class walked out and that boy took me by the shoulders and we all walked to the principles office and told him what had happened. Lets just say she isn’t teaching anymore.
Also, turns out that boy had a sister like me, who couldn’t really speak. We’ve been best friends for 8 years and i’ll be his best woman at his wedding next year.
The moral is that Teachers, even subs, and adults shouldn’t scold kids before knowing the whole story, because shit like that can fuck up kids self-esteem for the rest of their life.
I think one of the consequences of SJ’s tendency to refuse to empathise is that people who are oppressed for reasons that aren’t often discussed get pushed away, often to anti-SJ places, simply because their axis of oppression isn’t the most commonly discussed.
A lot of disabled people need to discuss the oppression they face as disabled people. Sometimes disabled men try to discuss the ways in which they are abused and oppressed primarily by women. There are patterns of abuse of disabled men which are predominantly done by women. There are ways in which non-disabled women use the power they have as non-disabled people to hurt disabled men, sometimes using gender and sexism as a way to portray themselves as victims. These situations are complicated, and it can be hard to tell just by looking at them who is the victim.
SJ forgets disability so much, and is so used to looking at easily visible things like race and gender, that sometimes people look at a situation, and go “clearly that man is privileged over that woman, she must be the victim in this situation”. If you’re a disabled man trying to talk about this, having your experiences of oppression dismissed as “male tears” or “privileged whining” is alienating in a way that could easily push you away.
The MRA belief that women have “female privilege” is inaccurate. But if your experiences of oppression as a disabled man have been primarily at the hands of women, and your foray into SJ spaces didn’t identify this as disability based (because no one remembers disability), then what anti-SJ and MRA spaces are saying sounds like a more accurate description of your experiences.
Yes! And on a similar note, a lot of the time NT feminist leaning people tend to sort of… ignore neuroaytypical women’s stories, or get outright angry at them for being outside the approved narrative. Other people have spoken about this much more eloquently than I ever can, but the main examples I’m thinking of was all the furore over that autistic STEM woman’s article on how she found the STEM world, or the whole “sisterhood” thing, which weird women like me are told and shown very early on that we’re not a part of. Which at least in my experience, has made me a lot less willing to call myself feminist even if I have similar goals and beliefs as particular brands of feminists.
Now let me explain. We are just like everyone else because we are HUMAN!!! WOW WHAT A SHOCKER! OMG!
I had a guest shocked because the deaf lady that checked in before him was a complete bitch. He said and I quote “I thought those ppl were suppose to be nice.” Like what the fuck dude. She’s deaf she’s not a fucking fairy tale angle for fucks sake.
Disabled people are people get that threw your thick ass skulls.
Hell I’m the first to tell you I’m an evil bitch and I was like this way before I became disabled.
Disabled ppl can be rude.
Disabled ppl can be sexy.
Disabled ppl can be smart.
Disabled ppl can be anything because we are still just a fucking human being.
“Deaf inmates are punished for missing count or mealtimes, though the announcements are made over loudspeakers they cannot hear. They are beaten by guards for misunderstanding orders, and, when they successfully lip-read one interaction and fail the next, they are beaten for ‘feigning’ their hearing loss. In addition, because prisons rarely provide certified ASL interpreters, the inmates struggle to defend themselves at disciplinary proceedings and have limited or no access to medical, mental health, or justice center professionals. They also lack access to any tailored social, educational, or rehabilitative programming. This, by design, is the nature of prisons—undesirables are hidden, with limited attempts at reintegration or socialization between the incarcerated and society (translating, on its face at least, to less manpower and money spent by the corrections system).”
TIL: During the Vietnam War, the US decided to draft 350,000 people who had failed military entrance tests. “McNamera’s Morons” died at 3x the rate of other GIs.
not to be dramatic but this is no joke one of the most evil things i have read in my life
A passage from the article that’s cited the Reddit thread:
There
were plenty of men of draft age in America, but most were unavailable.
Many were attending college and using student deferments. Others had
found safe havens in the National Guard and Reserves, which by and large
were not sent to Vietnam. Still others were disqualified because they
scored poorly on the military’s mental and physical entrance tests.
How
could McNamara and Johnson round up enough men to send to war? They
realized that they would anger the vote-powerful middle class if they
drafted college boys or if they sent National Guardsmen and Reservists
to Vietnam. So they decided to induct the low-scoring men, whom Johnson
referred to (in a secret White House tape) as “SECOND-CLASS FELLOWS.” On
October 1, 1966, McNamara launched his program, which he called Project
100,000 because he wanted to induct that many low-aptitude men each
year
(Emphasis mine).
Think about that for a moment: Not only did they send 354,000 unqualified men into active combat – it was all to keep the machine of an unjust and unwinnable war grinding along.
Because if they had dared to draft non-disabled men, from middle class families, the political backlash would have been too strong.
They sent disabled men to die because society doesn’t care about disabled lives.
(And Hitler tested his gas chambers on disabled people first, before he rounded up Jewish people, for the very same reason)
I think it’s funny that able bodied people think disability prejudice is gonna be solved by cyborg parts, like those of us who will have them aren’t gonna be bugged with constant “Yeah, but you know, you still aren’t human in the strictest sense of the term, I mean whole human, natural and organic, you know what I mean…”
And with capitalism still in existence getting implants or prosthesis will just be grafting planned obsolescence onto your actual body. People honestly think they won’t make limbs the same way they make other electronics?
These never occurred to me but you are right. I can think of worse things. Government control over what parts can not do for parts paid for with government money. You got eye implants while on “welfare”. Then they better not be used for “immoral” things like strip clubs. Gps locks take care of that.
Government legs? You better use them for at least X number of steps a day to prove they were needed.
New arm but unemployed? Better have a job or it turns off.
A big thing I’m also thinking about is cyborg parts that are so specialized for one job-related task that they get in the way of literally EVERYTHING else you might want to do, unless you buy more of them, especially in the early years:
An arm specialized for factory work that’s so heavy it causes spinal damage and chafing around the stump area(more so then even normal artificial limbs)
An mechanized exoskeleton so you can walk in an outdoor-type job, but nobody considered you might want to remove it to bathe or have sex because why would the cripples want to do a silly thing like that
This stuff is such a big deal and yet somehow a lot of transhumanists seem to have totally missed the fact that most cyberpunk authors are totally cognizant of what a nightmare hellscape future digital capitalism will be
And don’t forget the element of coercion/lack of bodily autonomy that will very absolutely come with having widespread mecha-upgrades that can “fix” us broken folks – because for sure, if disability can be solved with robot parts, do you think the able-bodied folk are going to trust us for long to make the decisions for ourselves as to whether or not we want those cyborg bits installed? They’ll be passing laws that say we have to get them or we don’t get accommodations we need anyway, jamming them into us as babies (whether they work fully well or not), using us to alpha test them, it’s going to be fun times.
I’m pretty sure we already do that last one with cochlear implants…
#like this is a thing i already see in the present? #when it comes to deafness and cochlear implants/hearing aids #and hearing people constantly sniping at us #like no i’m not getting a terp #why don’t you just put your hearing aids in #sorry it doesn’t work like that #i’d still need a terp even if i were wearing them #but even if i didn’t just seriously #wearing my hearing aids also aggravated my DEBILITATING MIGRAINES #to the point where i literally could not get through a day of work #without collapsing in pain #abled people just never trust us to make our own decisions about our health and our lives #like that is going to change in the least as technology advances #nope nope nope
Haha yeah that was my tags on that post. XD We are… already there with this on some of these things it’s just going to get moreso as technology progresses.
Absolutely. All of this. Especially the part around cochlear implants. Those things were creeping me out when I first learned about them 27 years ago.
I suppose they’re fine for adults who lose their hearing late in life, after having built up a strong social-linguistic network (especially if they’re at an age where learning a new language – such as the native Sign Language of their country – would be too difficult).
But to implant them into the brains of babies?! Before they’re old enough to consent? While their brains are still growing at their most rapid pace?!
*shudder*
How is that not nightmare fuel for everyone?
And here’s another dystopian scenario that my brain keeps going back to:
Okay. So imagine a future society does find a cure for every disability now known to man, just like the transhumanists promise us.
The very concept of “accommodations” fades from memory.
Sooner or later, life – being the wacky, chaotic, fragile, thing it is – will create a new disease, condition, or disability that’s never been seen before.
One for which there is no cure.
And, now, there is also a political incentive to deny even the existence of disabled people, because the whole foundation of Transhumanist Civilization is Life Without Weakness.
Gradually (or not so gradually), the range of “normal variation” that’s deemed acceptable narrows, and anyone who has less then absolute peak strength/health/height/clear skin/straight teeth, etc. is not just looked at with pity, but with suspicion… as if they are willfully posing a threat to the social order.
And even people we would deem to be normally able-bodied/able-minded would find themselves marginalized.
Smart and lazy is a horrible combination that results in disappointed teachers, exasperated friends and a whole lot of bad doodling
Oh shit this was literally me in school
Don’t forget those angry parents and half finished homework assignments crumpled in your binders
Im smart and tired I want to do good but i dont feel like trying anymore
Smart and lazy is intentionally an ableist construction designed for people (especially undiagnosed disabled people) to fail.
It isn’t used just on disabled people (although I would likely argue that most of those that this phrase is used against who aren’t officially disabled are either self diagosed, undiagnosed disabled or chronically ill, or are being affected by lateral ableism*)
*There is a theory out there called lateral discrimination where the claim is that other forms of discrimination are rooted from ableism (i.e. the sexist belief that women are weaker in all ways or the racist belief that POCs are inferior or the homophobic/transphobic belief that they are broken if they aren’t cis/straight all stem from ableist beliefs of inferiority, brokenness, weakness, worthlessness, etc).
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.