Author: Paul Tomblin

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008

Frankly, I don’t even know if I count as “disabled”. Certainly, the people who see me walking around in public don’t see me as disabled. They probably see me as fat and lazy, because I seek out a chair and sit down as soon as I can, or take the elevator even for just one floor, or even sometimes ask for one of the wheel chairs they keep locked up near the customer service desk. You see, what I have isn’t totally disabling, only inconveniencing.

I have knee pain. The pain is constant, but it increases when I do things (sitting with my knees bent under my chair is the worst, standing is the second worst, walking actually isn’t as bad as standing, although walking slower than my natural pace is pretty bad). I’ve had it for 2/3rds of my life now, and it gets worse with every passing year. It used to just be a dull ache, with very rare intense stabbing pains. The first time I got the stabbing pain I cried out and had to sit down for several minutes while I tried to figure out how I was going to get to my car, and at first I probably only got it about once a year or so. Recently the frequency of the stabbing pains has increased to about once a week. Every year I think “I can take this, but if it gets any worse I won’t be able to stand it”, and every year it gets worse, and I somehow manage to stand it. There are times when I think “I hope I die young, because after 30 years of ever increasing pain I’m not sure I can stand another 30 years of this.” It already nearly killed me once, because with the constant background of pain I mistook a burst appendix for trapped gas – by the time I bothered to see a doctor, I had gangrene in a couple of feet of intestine.

It constrains my life, and in some ways it defines it. Over the years, I’ve given up cross country skiing, orienteering, backpacking, canoe tripping, mountain biking, and probably other things I’ve forgotten, all because of the pain. I’ve lately taken up kayaking to try to recover some of that feeling of freedom, but I’ve discovered that my elbow joints are just as much traitors to me as my knees – the pain in them is increasing gradually and I wonder how many years I’m going to get out of them before I have to give up that as well.

The thing about pain is that you can make a conscious choice to accept it if there is something you absolutely must do, or even if there is something that you want to do so much that the resulting escalation of pain is worth it. That’s why I don’t consider myself disabled, but merely inconvenienced. Pain is like a bank account – I can choose to “spend” it, or I can try to conserve it. That’s why you’ll see me walking around Oshkosh, or why I was able to rough-house and play with my kids when they were younger. I “spent” that pain, and while I’m still making the payments now, it was worth it. But that’s why I’ll grab a wheel chair or find a bench to sit on at the mall – if I don’t spend it now, I’ll have that much more to spend on something worthwhile.

Sometimes I take a cane when I go places. It doesn’t help a lot, but it does seem to change people’s attitudes when I’m seeking out some place to sit down. Like I said, I need to keep my knees straight when I’m sitting. If I don’t have my cane, people trip over my legs and glare at me for daring to intrude on their space, but if they trip over my cane, they apologize.

My experiences in the wheel chair have been enlightening. I’ve had store clerks talking to my wife as if I were unable to make my own decisions, or ignore me and serve customers who were standing behind me. But the difference between me and someone who is truly disabled is that if I choose to, I can stand up and end the discrimination. I never forget the people who can’t.

Hooray for on-line training!

Wow, never thought I’d utter that sentence.

Every two years, I have to re-take the Health Safety and Environment Orientation for contract employees. In the past, that’s always required me to show up at the HSE office at 7am, sit with a bunch of the type of contractors who do actual work (you know, with tools and stuff instead of computers), and be lectured on the proper way to dispose of dirt or what to do if your backhoe (or computer, in my case) accidentally ruptures a line carrying something nasty. Usually the lecturer is some grumpy old guy who reminds me of Jasper in that Simpson’s episode where he ends up teaching a class in the school. “Using a camera? That’s a paddling. Smoking on the property? Immediate firing, then a paddling. Improperly disposing of construction garbage? First we fine your employer, then fire you, then a paddling.” And of course, I can’t tell you how useful it is to know that I’m not allowed to use $EMPLOYER ladders or oxygen lines in my line of work.

This year, however, they’ve got on-line training. And not only that, but they have different training for outside workers and office workers. So I clicked the link, and got a stupid animated guy pointing at a button on the side menu saying “Start by clicking this button”. “Fuck that”, I thought, and clicked on the button marked “Final Assessment”. I took the test, got 10 out of 10, and got the certificate, all in way less time than I’m wasting on writing this blog post. So hooray for on-line training where you skip the boring bits (ie. all of it) and go straight to the incredibly obvious test questions.

BTW, the test questions were all on the order of “Where do you dispose of waste? A) toss it over the fence onto non-$EMPLOYER property, B) make a big pile and set fire to it C) put it in designated containers or D) Your contract will have instructions on proper waste disposal” And I’m not kidding, that is pretty much verbatim. (BTW: The correct answer is D – sometimes the contract will require you to remove the waste yourself.)

Carp::croak()

I went kayaking after work today on Irondequoit Creek. The carp were mating, and there were lots of dead ones floating around, thus my little perl joke in the title.

It was a great day to blow off work a bit early, and Rob and I went upstream from Bay Creek Paddling Center up just past the Elison Park dog beach. I was pretty tired on the way back, and it didn’t help that the wind shifted around and got cold, so we ended up with headwinds in both directions. According to the thermometer in my car, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees in the course of the hour and a half paddle, although it felt like the temperature change happened all at once when the wind shifted.

The weir was a bit of a challenge, but nothing like it had been last time I took a look at it. I nearly dug a rail under, and was grateful for my spray skirt. Rob took about three tries, but mostly because he tried hitting it from one side or the other instead of coming right up the middle.

A couple of times we saw a bird that at first we thought was some sort of Loon because it was so low in the water, but it had no white markings, only black, with a bit of red or orange near the base of the beak. When it flew, we could see very long pointy wings. And when it swam it held its beak up at a 45 degree angle to the water, rather than parallel like a Loon does. I guessed it was a Cormorant, and after looking it up, I’m sure of it.

We also saw lots of geese. At one point, we heard a lot of honking up ahead, and as we rounded the corner this goose left the shore and paddled out in front of us, and did a bit of a fake take-off, presumably to try to lead us away from his nest. But this annoyed another goose, who then flew into the first one and attacked him until they both flew off.

Lots of people and dogs in the dog park, including two people who kept asking us all sorts of questions about paddling and seemed put out that we continued paddling instead of stopping to talk after we’d answered a couple. And one canoe coming upstream just as we’d flushed the Cormorant downstream for the last time. They asked us what the bird was, I said Cormorant, and the woman in the front of the canoe said “See, I told you” to the man in the back.

Lots of fun.