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I'm not really reading my reading list at the moment, mostly because I'm spending a lot of time being really grumpy and I fear saying something I'll regret when I'm not.
I'm grumpy, of course, because of ongoing pain and inconvenience due to having a broken leg, as well as all my Hilarious Cast Adventures.
Put it this way - I broke my leg less than a month ago, and I'm on my sixth cast.
First one went on at Emergency, and was removed three days later for surgery. Second one went on post-surgery, but was removed the next weekend because we were worried I had an infection, and was replaced with the third one, which was terrible - it was too thick, hideously heavy, and had been put on with my foot at an angle that rapidly became extremely uncomfortable. (I was lying on my stomach when it was put on, and the proprioceptors in my ankle were out - and still are. I can't accurately tell what position my foot is in without looking at it. I rely on other people to make my foot straight when they're putting it in a cast.)
Fortunately, that only lasted two days, because I had an oppointment at the ortho clinic for number four, which was blue and nifty but was cut off a few days later because my foot/ankle had swollen enough to be having blood supply issues. It was replaced with the fifth one, which unfortunately was a bit hastily and badly put on, and which came off by itself when the swelling went down and my ankle was no longer puffy enough to hold it in place.
Number six is doing okay so far, thankfully - but I'll be getting number seven on Thursday, at my next ortho clinic appointment. It's projected to last a few weeks before it has to come off too. After that, though, I should get a "removable boot", which will be awesome, because the prospect of being able to have a shower, a proper shower, without having to worry about keeping a cast dry is thoroughly appealing.
Not as appealing as the prospect of being able to stand on two feet or walk again, but that's much further away, and too depressing to think about. On the bright side, the muscles in my arms and my right leg have strengthened enough now that moving about as needed is no longer so painful and exhausting. (I'm not as fit as I'd like to be, but I don't really count it against my fitness levels that my muscles did not appreciate the radical changes to my methods of locomotion in the last few weeks - I was never going to be accustomed to hopping and/or holding my weight on my arms this much.)
This experience has brought home to me, mind you, the notion that the "not disabled" are better referred to as the "not yet disabled". I wasn't significantly physically disabled, but right now, I am, and it is, in fact, incredibly frustrating to deal with even when everyone around you pretty much couldn't be nicer, which I've been lucky enough that they have been. And it really is awfully easy to find yourself abruptly shunted into the Disabled category.
Accordingly, "poor wheelchair accessability" has become an issue about which I no longer am concerned with in the "Strongly, But Somewhat Impersonally" sense, but rather in the "No, Really, And With Personal Anger And Rage" sense. Because I used to just think it was important on moral and ethical and justice-type grounds, but now I have experienced the nature of life when a one-inch-high step that, walking, I wouldn't even notice, is actually a source of pain, exhausting effort and massive inconvenience, and really, it does make it all a lot more visceral.
I now feel, just a little bit, that anyone who gets pissy about providing proper wheelchair access to things should be provided with an unstable ankle fracture. Once you're a few days past surgery, they're not that painful - most of my pain now is muscle, knee and tendon-related, and a carefully administered break could avoid wrenching everything as badly as my fall did, and also avoid the extra broken bone I collected - and you don't get to walk for months.
I think it would serve as an excellent demonstration injury. Obviously, it doesn't cover anything *like* the full scale of what wheelchair-prompting disability can entail. After all, you can still move pretty well otherwise, and you have one working leg which makes a lot of things much, much easier. For example, I can get up off my wheelchair, using my working leg, and swivel around to get onto a toilet that has no lateral transfer access. I imagine that this is making my life vastly, inexpressably easier than if I couldn't.
Nonetheless, I do feel that it would do much to convey the point.
I was going to go on to the post I want to make about health care systems, but all this has gone on long enough that I think the other one needs to be a separate post. (I always prefer to make posts about Serious Topics separate from personal ones, in case people get linked to them.)
Especially posts in which I have been advocating the deliberate injuring of annoying people.
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