I had my eyes opened to such things when I was about sixteen.
My father, due to cancer of the throat, had his voicebox removed and had to speak by way of a mechanical voicebox held to his throat.
It took him months of speech therapy for me to be able to understand him without asking him to repeat himself.
One day, he and I were in a restuarant and we both gave our orders. The waitress couldn’t understand what he said and she kind of looked at me to “translate”. I began to repeat what my father had said and he interrupted with a huge SLAM! of his hand down on the table.
ALL conversation screeched to a halt. My father angrily screamed at me (in as much as a man with a mechanical voicebox can “scream”) “I WILL DO IT!”
Seems my mother and I, while trying to be well-intentioned, had been robbing the guy of his own independence by jumping in to help out when he wasn’t being understood by others. He’d had about enough of that and told me so in a rather colorful fashion.
Ironically, I lived in a town that had a residential school for the deaf and blind; and had several friends who were one or the other. Sure, I gave them assistance when they asked. Sometimes, I offered help and they refused.
But, until that moment, I had no idea how patronizing I must’ve been to my own dad.
:smack:
No fair! I get dibs!* I’ve been asking for robot arms for years!
[SIZE=2]I have progressive nerve damage in both arms. I have trouble typing, writing anything longer than a page, opening things,blah blah blah. This is significantly improved from the year where I didn’t have my dominant hand at all, which is the also known as The Year I Couldn’t Wipe My Own Ass Properly to Save My Life.*
[SIZE=1]**No, this was NOT something I’d let you help with, before you ask. I still have my bloody dignity!
Without wanting to make excuses for ignorant or stupid behaviour, sometimes people cause offense simply because they don’t know what to do - I know I’ve fallen foul of this before; disabled people aren’t all the same and you can’t necessarily tell at a glance what will or will not be possible/appropriate in terms of interaction - faced with such a burden of uncertainty, a lot of people are going to err on (what they believe to be)the side of caution; they’re just as frightened of trying to talk to the individual and being shot down as callous and unthinking by the individual’s helper as they are trying to talk to the individual and not being able to understand the response. It often really isn’t borne out of malice, but fear and misplaced concern.
Even after several different iterations of the above, able-bodied people aren’t necessarily any better off at tackling the issue, simply because they still don’t know what will be appropriate in the next particular case, but also they now have the fear based on the fact that they fucked it up every single time in the past.
Like I said, I’m not making excuses for malice, but it’s awfully easy for ordinrary social awkwardness to appear malicious without there having been any evil intent whatsoever; I know I have done so in the past and I can’t guarantee it won’t happen in the future.
I think I made it clear in my OP that I was trying to inform people, not accuse. I know that most of this behavior is borne out of social awkwardness. Informing people of what is considered rude will help curb that awkwardness, will it not? Some things are up to personal preference, like the example of kneeling down to look at someone, but the talking through someone else thing seems universal in its condemnation, no matter what disability is being dealt with.
Indeed, and I should say that I don’t feel accused, I merely felt the need to share my perspective on the matter - interaction can be a wretched process for both parties.
I don’t particularly wish to be argumentative, but I’m sure if we tried hard enough, we could imagine examples where talking to the disabled person, not the helper, would be (mis)interpreted as unbearably rude (depending much on the condition and emotional state of the disabled person and the attitude of the helper). Although I’d concede that your point holds for the vast majority of cases - it’s often the fear of the whole damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation that forces people into unnaturally tense states and makes them do things that appear stupid and callous.
You may have a point, but try as I might I cannot fathom such a situation. Have you personally come accross such a situation? I’m not trying to be argumentative either, I’m just curious.
Not with speaking (although I can imagine hypotheticals where the helper might get a bit high-horse if the disabled person had just undergone surgery for layrngeal cancer and couldn’t speak), but I have been in a sort of analogous situation; I was meeting a bunch of people and shaking their hands in turn, only to notice that one of the people in the group had very seriously deformed hands (to the extent that they were almost entirely missing) - it’s not that I was afraid to touch them out of any ‘ick’ factor, but rather a kind of blind ’ :eek: what the fuck do I do now? :eek: ’ panic - in the end I extended my hand and we sort of did a shake, but to this day I don’t know whether he’d have preferred me not to and what he (and the others) thought of me for trying. Anyone in the position where they must make an important and rapid, yet uninformed choice is probably going to fuck it up half the time.
Of course this doesn’t account for or pardon run-of-the-mill everyday stupidity, such as kicking your chair wheels etc.
Mangetout is right - there are occasions when the able-bodied have good intentions and it gets taken wrong. Just look at the difference between your reaction to someone squattig down to speak to you and Dignan’s.
I have a friend who’s paraplegic, and I’ve seen all kinds of stupid behavior (there was another thread about this just recently, too.) Servers in restaurants who have ignored him and asked me what he wanted to order, people shoving past him, people over-enunciating when they talk to him, etc. Then there was the ER nurse who wanted to weigh him - a trained medical professional, mind you. There IS a scale designed to weigh people who use wheelchairs, but she didn’t have one for some reason, so she asked him to step on the scale. “I can’t,” he said, “I’m paraplegic.”
:eek: Good lord! The stupid, it BURNS! I’d have had trouble believing I was actually awake at this point had it been me, and my reactions would be numbed shock. I try to treat people with respect, and if I can see that I have somehow annoyed them while trying to be respectful I’ll apologize and ask them what they’d like me to do instead. I’d probably pull up a chair to talk to you, Carnick and Dignan for several reasons. First, my right knee isn’t so good, and crouching for very long isn’t a good idea, nor is standing for extended periods. Also, I like to be able to look face to face at the person I am speaking to, whether I’m the “short” one, or the person I’m conversing with is.
I have a slight speech impediment, and I worked with someone who insisted she couldn’t hear me. She would often turn to someone else and ask “What did she say?” It drove me nuts.
I was once waiting for a store to open along with a friend in a motorized wheelchair. A child who was waiting there with his mother started to say something, and she ssshed him. I said “That’s all right. What would you like to know?” The child looked right at the guy and said “How does that chair move?”
I used to live with a guy who was in a wheelchair (who actually now works as an advocate for Disabled Rights, and is running for office too) and I think he would have punched you in the nuts if you bent over to talk to him. I guess some people would appreciate it, but it’s not something I would ever do because it just reeks of “aww look at the cute guy in the wheelchair!” Yuck.
Generally, I learned pretty quickly to just stop overthinking things and treat him (and others with obvious diabilities) no differently than anyone else. It sounds cliche, but 99% of annoying behavior comes in some way from violating this concept. So for example, I might hold the door open for someone behind me (because I do this for anyone), but I’m not going to follow someone around trying to hold open every door I can find. Likewise, I’m not going to randomly push someone up a ramp because it looks kind of hard. You wouldn’t offer to carry someone walking up a steep hill; it’s much the same idea.
Zoe, here’s where Carnick and I actually agree. You were right to help. It’s always nice to offer, even if it turns out that it isn’t needed. Like Carnick, I will rarely ask for help, unless the need is urgent. In the event that I did ask for help and wound up with the 1 in 100 people that really was in a hurry, I don’t want to impose on them, or make them feel guilty if they really can’t help. Always offer help. If you work in an office or have regular contact with someone, after the first time, say something like, “Let me know if you do need help with something so I don’t badger you.” I’ve had people offer to give me a push when the weather is fine. I would politely turn it down, and then wished people would offer when the weather was bad. I had a feeling I might have brought it on myself because people figured I didn’t need help ever. Now when someone offers, I tell them that I’m OK, but if there’s snow on the ground to offer again.
Mangetout, you’re right about people being uncomfortable or unsure, and that’s understandable. I do my best to keep a sense of humor about everything, and while there are some things that can be irritating, I find most of the things to be funny since I wasn’t always paralyzed. Like with the kneeling/squatting to be on “my level.” Like I said, it isn’t really patronizing. Instead I think, “Just stand up, otherwise we both look stupid.” As other messages in the thread show, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus.
When my husband was on Canadian crutches, people always tried to talk to me instead of him. As soon as he could walk on his own, they talked to him instead of me. I’m not disabled, just short, fat, and female. It’s wierd, but so many times, one of us would talk and the person we were trying to talk to would address the other, like the person who talked was invisible.
He is very outgoing so it was very hard for him when people would try to talk to me instead, aside from just the usual infuration at being treated like furniture.
For me, I’d rather they talk to him for most things, but if I am asking questions, I expect the answer to be give to me. Hubby warns sales guys when they do this. If they do it more than once, I talk to their managers and go somewhere else to buy what I wanted. When they used talk to me instead of hubby, I tried to call them on it, but it did not seem to get through. It it seems like even talking to their managers did not help.
Back when he was on crutches, when I was feeling shy ( went though a period of agoraphobia), the people trying to talk to me instead of hubby really got to me. I’d use to try to hide behind hubby (I was not as fat then) and look to him to do the talking. People assumed I was mentally retarded or something and they would speak slowly to hubby. Once we were asked where our keepers were.
When it comes to the ‘squat or not’ question, I think it depends on the person standing as much as it does on the person in the chair. Some people just like to get closer to their speaking partners than others, and maybe don’t realise that they’re standing too close for comfort. I think a metre and a half is a fine distance for face-to-face communication, and I’d feel pretty self-conscious (embarrassed? wrong?) if I had to talk down to another adult’s upturned face.
I don’t like it at all when people squat – I’m 4’2", rare type of dwarfism, yadda yadda. I’d rather just look up, and if we’re going to be talking for a while, go sit down somewhere. If we’re in a loud place and you can’t hear me (sometimes that happens) and you need to bend over to catch a few words, that’s okay. But I also strongly dislike the squat maneuver. I know other people around my height who like it, so your best bet is to, as with folks in chairs, find out what that person prefers.
And yes, I am very short. You don’t need to say it in a tone of wonder, two or three times. Yes, I am unusual, you don’t see people like me often. (You really don’t. My condition happens in something like less than a million births. I have longer limbs and a shorter trunk, the opposite proportions of people with achondroplasia. There’s a lot more of them out there.) Why, yes, I do have money to buy these items I want to buy. Why you also feel the need to comment repeatedly on my height, I don’t know.
One of these days I think I’m going to shriek “WHAT THE HELL??? OH MY GOD, I NEVER NOTICED!” at one of the commentators.
I see squatting to look you in the eye as a sign of respect, unless there is a group of people talking, then I would remain standing.
I wouldn’t think of squatting to speak to someone who was merely much shorter, like whiterabbit, unless you’re really attractive, then I’d want to come down so I could look at you closer and touch your arm, etc.
You and I would get along just fine. I love talking to short people, they’re the only ones I can look eye to eye with (without the controversial squat maneuver).
Hypotheticals are just hypotheticals. I and thousands of other people live with this talk-through-someone-else crap everyday. It’s amusing at least, and horribly frustrating and demeaning at worst. If you’re talking to a strange looking person, hedge your bets and talk to their face. Sure, your hypothetical situation could come up one in a bajillion times, but sheesh we’re only human. Yeah I know people don’t mean any harm, but this is so easy to fix if we just make an effort. I say we because I’ve probably done it too. Just because I’m disabled doesn’t mean I’m immune to treating other disabled people badly. I worded the OP like I did because I thought it sounded funny, but in retrospect I see that it looks pretty inflammatory and accusing. Let me reiterate, these issues aren’t just limited to able-bodied people.
To your example above, I think you did the right thing by attempting to shake their hands. You weren’t aware ahead of time. When people don’t know what to do with me, sometimes they’ll just tap the back of my hand which is cool.
