Public Perceptions of Disability

My wife of 12 years, aged 45, suffered a severe head injury in the early spring of 2007. This injury occurred in the workplace. I have numerous bad things to say about the whole worker's compensation system as it exists, but I will save that for another article. I want to concentrate on how the injury has changed the way she lives and makes her way through day to day living, and the way others perceive her. It has left her disabled.

She has a non-stop headache. It never goes away. Some days it is more painful than others. There is always a pain level of at least 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. Some days there is a secondary headache from sinuses or weather change. Those days are excruciating for her and she really wants to just stay in a quiet, dark room all day.

Part of her disability leaves her with a great deal of trouble balancing when she walks. As a result, she uses a cane, and will use any handrails available. She can walk, but it is difficult to go more than about half a block. If she gets up too fast, she will become nauseated instantly, and becomes dizzy.

As the day wears on her ability to focus on what she is doing goes into decline. By the end of the day she begins to stutter, and becomes difficult to understand. She is also very sensitive to noise. Every time a semi goes by our house, it sounds like a train at about 5 feet. She becomes irritable very easily.

She never used to be like this. She was very active and worked at two different jobs. She was in better shape than I was, and I am younger. Her whole world has not been the same, and I don't see a great deal of hope for much improvement.

When we go places, like the grocery store, she uses one of those battery-powered buggies. This is where we have both noticed how she is treated differently. Just today we were in a store, and the greeter saw her struggling with the end of the charger cord of the buggy. Instead of offering to clip the plug on the hook behind the seat, she got a lecture about how the cord could be damaged, if it was not put away correctly. I was parking the car at the time and heard about this later. When we were cruising across the store, a mother told her kids to "Get out of the way of the crippled lady". Whenever she is using the buggy, people first look at her like she is lazy, but if they see the cane, they feel sorry for her.

Some aisles in the store are too narrow for her to pass a regular shopping cart. This problem slows us down quite a bit if we are shopping together. She has some trouble reading small print, this also slows her down. The noise levels with her extra sensitive hearing make shopping excruciating, so much so she often will wear earplugs.

What annoys her more than any of these things is when she has had a difficult day and she is stuttering. She will run into people we both know, and they will talk to her, and see she is stuttering and then just talk to me. Sometimes talking "above" her as if she does not understand. The fact is, her thought process is a sharp as ever, she has always had a great deal of wit and intelligence. That has NOT changes. It is just difficult for her to vocalize sometimes. It comes through her brain just as before, but she cannot always say it as clearly as before.

Some people just make assumptions about my wife that are not true. It annoys me as well. She does pretty well for all that she has been through. I love her dearly and I really hope that people will treat her with the dignity she deserves.