You Can Walk And Still Need A Wheelchair

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 6.03% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

I’m lucky enough to have infinite steps. I don’t even count ’em when I wake up in the morning: I take the dog out for a walk, and my legs keep working for as long as I want ’em to. I go to the museum and I pay no attention to the distance between galleies. However many steps I need to take, they’re just there.

Most of you don’t even think that’s a blessing. Trust me, it is.

Some of my friends have zero steps: their legs stopped working. They’re “traditionally” disabled, because their muscles or their nerves don’t respond, and no amount of effort can get them walking. It sucks, and sucks hard, but at least that step count is predictable.

Unlike my friends who play the Step Lottery every day: How many steps do they get before their body gives out?

That variance is huge. Some days, they’ve got so many steps they can walk everywhere and have steps left over at the end of the day. Other days, they get a paltry thousand and give out in the middle of the grocery store.

And they don’t have some magical step gauge that counts down to zero: they wake up, they feel great, and they only discover today’s Step Lottery gifted ’em a slim 500 steps when they’re halfway to Wal-Mart.

Wherever they give out, they’re done. It’s like an old D&D wizards’ spell; they’re not getting any more steps until they’ve rested for eight hours.

And when you run out of steps three blocks from home, you’re fucking screwed. If you didn’t have the energy to walk, you sure as hell don’t have the energy to crawl. So if you’re lucky, you sit on a bench for hours and hope your body somehow considers it restful.

If you’re not lucky, you’re stuck there until a friend picks you up.

If you’re really not lucky, you don’t have a friend. Hope you can afford a cab!

When able-bodied people see a wheelchair, they think “That person can never walk.” And if they see that person getting up out of the wheelchair, they often think, “That person’s cheating! They’re not really disabled! They were fooling me!”

Nope. That wheelchair is their insurance against the Step Lottery. Because they can walk now, but at some point during the day their body is all but guaranteed to give out on them… and it’s a hell of a lot easier to bring the wheelchair when you don’t need it than it is to be wheelchair-less when you do need it.

They’re not fooling you at all, buddy. Their bodies slip between “walking” and “not walking” with frightening speed, and they can’t predict when that wheelchair is going to be the only thing that gets them home today. So be gentle.