The Un-Social Contract

For about the past week, I've been mostly on crutches. In a dazzling display of balletic grace, I fell up the stairs to my house.

I have gone through the usual everyone wants to help business and honestly, have been grateful to have doors held open for me. But today I realized that if the doors slid open automatically, this would have been a non-starter. Most of the doors I went through were doors to public buildings. It was easier to get into the door of a house than the door to my library.

What I have not been so crazy about is people presuming they can touch me - people I've never met before in my life, non-medical people. I'm sure it's well-meant, but it can literally throw me off balance. Reaching around me, reaching in front of me, reaching for my crutches, reaching for me, these are movements that can startle me. I'm not steady on my pins to begin with.

There seems to be a general understanding that the public could and should help someone who is obviously temporarily disabled. The kind of crutches I've been on are the apres-ski break kind, the underarm crutches now in a light and easily maneuvered aluminum.

It was very, very, very weird when I initially showed up at the urgent care facility after my failed gazelle-like spring up the stairs.

I couldn't walk at all on my own, but someone had passed along a pair of forearm crutches to me long ago, saying, "You'll never know when you might need them." Although they didn't do the trick, they got me from the car into the building, which I wouldn't have been able to do unaided.

I gimped my way into the check-in and the freak-out immediately began. I was offered a wheelchair and gratefully took it. When the nurse came in to take my bp and temperature, she looked at me from the corner of her eyes. "What's your underlying condition," she half-whispered to me.

Clumsiness? Hastiness? A pair of really vicious fake Croc shoes?

"A hurt leg," I said.

"Oh. It was hurt before?"

"No, I hurt it an hour ago."

"Not MS?" (The staff at this particular facility has been trying to assign MS to me for the past two years. I have never been diagnosed with MS and I don't have any symptoms of it.)

"No."

"Then why do you have those crutches?"

"To get me from the car to this building."

The nurse went away. The doctor came in, looked at me, declared that I needed a CT scan, that the operator had left half an hour ago, and I would have to go to the hospital. The doctor left and no one came back in. No one. No one came to give me anything for pain, to help me get dressed, they just left me there.

I dressed myself, took the new pair of aluminum crutches offered me, got into my car and drove myself to a completely different hospital's ER. I used the aluminum crutches to go in and there was given pain medication and was talked to like a human being.

It made me wonder how someone with a pre-existing disability is treated when he goes into an ER with a completely unrelated problem. I hope you aren't shunted off to the side like I was. But it wouldn't surprise me if you were.

I'm gradually getting better but not as quickly as I would like.

I have an interview for a contract gig tomorrow and do not want to walk in on crutches. Neither kind.