Disabled/handicapped person turning down help?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Yep, there’s very little a school disability services office could do for me that I’d need. I don’t need extended testing periods or anything, and a state-issued placard would cover me as far as parking/accessiblity go, as I don’t use a chair or scooter or anything like that so I’d just need to be able to park fairly close to where I need to go. Yes, I am really really really short which creates its own issues but none that affected me when I was in school and none which affect me much at work now aside from needing a stepstool to do some of my filing. My job is pretty sedentary so the issues I do have with being on my feet aren’t a problem.

This doesn’t mean I don’t self-identify as somebody who’s disabled because I do. You try functioning in a world where everything is proprtionately built for basketball players and tell me it’s not a form of disability. But I get by.

22

Excellent post.

I was thinking about how it’s a two-way street, that the people who are able to offer help should remember to ask rather than force their help onto the other person, but that also the person needing help has to find a way to make it clear that this isn’t a permenent refusal. Your ‘thanks, but not now - don’t let that hold you back from asking some other time!’ approach is perfect.

And so true about mean people sometimes happening to have a disability.

I think, however, a bit of an excuse, is that sometimes the disability - esp. if it causes pain - can cause the person to be a bit cranky, or if they’re doing something that requires a lot of effort, can cause them to be very brief with their response. If you’re panting with exhaustion while struggling with the stairs in a noisy public place, then the ‘thanks’ after the ‘no’ can disappear in a puff of air.

That doesn’t explain the story of the mean crazy blind man attacking someone who was also apparently disabled enough to not be able to move away from someone who was hitting them.

23

I have a rescue friend who is in a wheelchair. Once I got to Petco while there was wet snow and ice falling. I saw my friend skidding so I ran over to her, dropped my bag on her lap, grabbed the handles and ran inside with her. We didn’t think twice, but a random stranger thought that she needed to bitch me out over that.

My friends response was to bitch the stranger out. Just because shes in a wheelchair doesn’t mean that she can’t have friends. She was most upset that she thought that anyone would think that she didn’t have control of her life and needed a stranger to tell me to not help her get inside when it was very nasty outside.

Me…I just stood there and took notes. It was epic :smiley:

24

My usual phrasing is “want help”? Sometimes that gets a yes, sometimes a no, sometimes a no which later becomes a yes. I’ve seen people say “here, let me help you” and grab an item from the hands of the person who was having problems - no? He reamed your ass? Srsly? Wooooow… It’s one of those cases where thinking “would you want someone to do that for you, or would you feel like they’re doing it to you?” would have been useful.

Housing codes in Spain require every new building to be “wheelchair accesible” and old ones which get fixed to be made wheelchair accesible, but there are no details given and there are many disabled people who aren’t helped by “wheelchair accesibility” as implemented. My brother’s Civil Service (replacement for his military service) was spent taking brain-damaged people on wheelchairs for “walks”; he says every politician who’s in charge of town planning should have to do that for a couple of days, preferably with at least one nonverbal passenger over 90kg and prone to trying to jump over the chair’s arms.

Two examples:
the building where I work is very modern, and very ecological, and the company is an EEO and then some. But nobody realized that it isn’t enough with having gates that are wide enough for a wheelchair and lifts everywhere and disabled bathrooms: you need those gates to be openable by someone on crutches, and you need people on crutches or in a chair to be able to navigate the fire doors between the office areas and the bathroom area, and these people need to be able to exit the building in an emergency, when the lifts can’t be used. Different patches get implemented to fix these problems as they crop up; for the people on crutches, the usual system for the gates is that either the receptionist opens the wide gate from her desk or someone who’s nearby scans that person’s card. That gate may be wide enough for a wheelchair, but the lady in crutches in my building looks like she’s about to fall down every time she gets through because she sort of has to walk diagonally, it should be another handspan wider so she’d be able to walk normally.

My rental is in a 3yo building. Ramps everywhere, but again the problem of “ok, so how do you leave if you’re in a chair and the lifts are off?”. Also, the entrance has a step, and a door which opens inward (that’s illegal!) and has to be held or it closes with a bang. People tell me “oh, chairs have a lever on the back, you step on it and lift the front”: that still requires help! So you can see someone who’s been perfectly able to navigate his way to that door, as the crossing points on the street really are wheelchair-ready, but who needs help there - and the one time I saw someone get to that point and see that he could not get up the door or call whomever he was going to see (the bells are too high) he looked like he would have liked to explain The Facts of Life to the architect in excruciating detail. It took me to hold the door open and a boy who was passing by and offered to help to push the chair in (he also called the flat the man was visiting).

25

I will always offer assistance, and not take it personally if I am declined. There is a certain dignity in doing for yourself, and I realize this. However, should things get out of hand, it’s also nice to have help.

If a conversation develops, I’ll offer that I’m an EMT and lifting assistance is part of the job, plus my wife spent numerous years in a scooter until her knees were replaced.

26

Is this a door that closes on its own, or did she intentionally close it knowing that you were behind her? Because if it’s the latter then she’s just a touchy, nasty person who needs a lesson in manners, period.

More likely, from my experiences both personally and as an activist within the disability community, people who generally demur help from strangers do so from long experience that the help that’s typically offered isn’t actually helpful or is actively harmful. It’s better to just keep on and go about your life rather than getting into a push and pull with some unknown person about what you “need.”

For example, a friend who uses a crutch with an arm support (the kind that looks like a cuff around your bicep) uses her knapsack as a counterbalance. Put over one shoulder, it helps her stay upright and walk a lot more steadily and for longer distances. She needs that bag exactly where it is for her own benefit. But everyone who “wants” to help her can only ever conceive of removing her needed bag as the form of help to give her, and people get incredibly touchy when she says no. People have physically tried to remove her bag from her person against her will in the name of “helping” her, and have yelled at her friends, when they see us walking with her, for not helping her by carrying the bag. (Never mind that most of her friends have disabilities of our own. None of us use a supported crutch so we’re seen as physically “better” than she is.)

The trouble with TABs is the rush to say “let me help” and then the presumption that the act that they’ve crafted in their minds as the one they should commit is the help that we need and we ought to be grateful for it.

The phrase “let me help” is useless. The phrase “**how can I **help?” should supplant it in everyone’s vocabulary. Imposed help isn’t help. Silencing the voices and ignoring the stated needs and lived experiences of people with disabilities is the exact opposite of help.

That’s because campus disability officers are (usually) awesome about not othering and questioning students with disabilities, and working with them to craft reasonable and acceptable accommodations. Usually.

Professors, on the other hand, once someone has been “outed” as disabled can be really problematic in ugly ways. It’s often much easier and an act of necessary and important self-protection to accommodate oneself as best as possible rather than being subjected to being called out in class during discussions, turned into an object lesson, turned into the punchline for bad lecture joke material, questioned about the veracity of the “claim” of disability, given accommodations begrudgingly or having needs either outright denied or lorded over them in a form of educational blackmail. And these things happen, at an alarmingly high rate. (If you spend any time on listservs or forums for students with disabilities the stories would make your eyes bug out of your head.)

27

Thank you so much, tumbleddown, you put that so eloquently and beautifully that I cannot think of anything to add. It is awful, however, to think of someone supposedly educated and professing to be an educator at that, making life miserable for someone with a disability. I can well imagine it happening just like that, though, and that’s the worst part - that there actually are people who do know better who just want to make someone’s life more miserable than their own pitiful existance. That’s exactly what I think of when I hear of someone like that.

As to the person at the breakroom door and whether or not they purposely pulled the door closed behind them … well, it did look that way, but I could have been mistaken. That’s me giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Thanks so much to all who have participated in the thread so far; I’ve definitely had a learning curve here and it will be a huge help, especially in reminding me to ask for help -when- I need it. Thanks again!

28

I’m a TAB, myself but I’ve been married to a disabled person for 20+ years, so I’ve learned a few things along the way. I’m sure if I’m still getting any of this wrong someone will correct me.

  1. tumbledown’s point about imposed help is spot on - I try to say “Would you like some help?” or “Could you use a hand?” That way it’s entirely in the other person’s court whether to say yes or no If I get a no I say “Give me a yell if you change your mind” and go about my business.

  2. Yes, sometimes people struggle to do something and it looks like they can’t. Let them do it anyway. Maybe they’re trying to figure out a way they can do it themselves, in which case “helping” them is counter-productive. At my house there was the long, sad, Saga of Failing to Open Jars for many years until we came up with a solution for my spouse, who is now back to being Chief Jar Opener (with some help from his little friend*)

  3. Treat any wheelchair, crutch or other mobility aid or adaptive device as an extension of that person’s body. Don’t touch unless given permission. This applies to aid creatures as well - do not pet the seeing eye dog, for instance.

  4. Disabled people have bad days, too - so don’t extrapolate one rude encounter into a pattern, and don’t smear one cranky disabled person across all disabled people since, you know, they’re all different individuals. Just because one blind man whacks people in the nuts at the bus stop doesn’t mean they all do that.

ETA: * Not intended as an endorsement of any brand or model, just an example of the beast.

29

My fiance is blind. We have a ‘system’ of managing doorways, whereby I say “left pull,” or “right push”, and HE does the push/pull, and then I proceed through the door first. Having such a system, we don’t need people to hold doors for us. This is a problem because he doesn’t know where the doorway is unless I let him know, and there’s a risk he will bump the doorsill/doorholder, or possibly get whacked in the head (this has happened as people rush to pull a door open ahead of us - please don’t anyone ever do that without asking!).

There have been times that we have made repeated requests for the person to let the door go and let us get through ourselves - and they’ve just stood there like cretins holding the damn door. That’s when things get interesting.

As far as helping disabled strangers, I don’t make any offer, but I will generally take any opportunity to make a little conversation or say hi so there’s an opening for their request if need be.

30

I said “calm” not “motionless”. When the guy tapped his legs, he turned and looked mortified, but when the upper part of the cane went into his crotch he most definitely tried to get out of the way. He just wasn’t very successful, until he spoke up. The blind man kept moving forward right into the man, so it was the upper part of the cane was what was hitting him. He wasn’t getting whipped with the end of it or anything like that. I still looked like it smarted though.

That particular blind man was always pretty much a jerk though. He is/was known in the neighbourhood for being VERY hostile to clerks, cashiers, and wait staff and was rather outspoken with his disdain. I think he lived in my friend’s building because I saw him near the co-op a lot. As an unrelated aside, he also had the WHITEST shirts I have ever seen! You would think he had an endless supply of white golf shirts and threw them out after wearing them once.

31

I go into my customers homes for a living(satellite tv tech.) and run into disabled folks regularly.
If they are trying to do something I always watch and if they are having problems ask "do you want me to grab that?"Sometimes its yes please and thank you, others its nope, I can get it myself. Its kinda hard sometimes cause being from the south you are brought up to jump in and help the old,infirm or whatever.

32

Just an addendum to my previous posts. Do you go for a walk or run to get some exercise (not addressed to any particular person)? Well, I can’t since I can’t walk at all. Consider the possibility when I am puffing along going up a slope that I might be doing that for the sake of exercise.

33

Well, what you said was:

Based on that statement, I inferred that he remained motionless. Upon reading your further description, though, I can better picture the scene.

mmm