(In) Accessibiltiy Spotlight: Summer Edition

It's time for an edition of the (In)Accessibility Spotlight, brought to you by my local public transit company, not naming any names.

This particular company has an accessibility policy based on a "Cooperative Seating" system on regular buses and a paratransit option for people who need door to door service. I don't currently qualify for paratransit, because apparently bus operators refusing to follow policy doesn't fit their criteria. I may qualify in the winter though.

The Cooperative Seating system looks like priority seating on the surface, but it's a touch more... complicated in practice. Here's the blurb from their website on the topic:

What is Cooperative Seating?

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Cooperative or priority seating areas are available near the front of our buses and the REDACTED entrances.  These seats are intended for customers who may have difficulty standing in a moving vehicle, including:

• Persons with disabilities
• Senior citizens
• Persons with assistive devices, such as wheelchairs, scooters, walkers and canes
• Pregnant women
• Customers with open strollers

This is a pretty wide segment of the population, which, in theory, I think is really great. All people deserve to use public transit safely. The company even issues priority seating cards to people with invisible disabilities. The cards are the same colour as the ID card for the adult passes, which causes some confusion, but overall they're useful.

The problem comes in when there's competition for the seats. The official policy is first-come-first-served for people who need the seats. That's rarely how it works out in practice.

Take today's incident as an example:

I got on the bus this afternoon. I live near the beginning of the route, so getting a seat when I got on the bus wasn't difficult and the driver even waited until I was seated to drive. The bus before had been late enough that the bus I was on actually ended up ahead of it in a few spots and both buses were getting pretty crowded. I was about 3/4 of the way to my destination when 3 families with strollers got on the bus. The people sitting across from me got up to make room for 2 of the strollers, but I'm unable to stand on the bus, and I need to sit facing the aisle because I have trouble bracing my feet (it's excruciatingly painful, especially with a lot of sharp starts and stops). I explained this to both the driver and the woman with the stroller. The driver insisted that I had to get up, and that the policy isn't first-come-first-served.

Then the dad of the kid in the stroller starts in on me, telling me (talking to me like a disobedient child no less) that these seats were priority seating and that I had to get up for strollers. I once again explained that I need the seat, that I have a priority seating card, and that I walk with canes. The driver again insisted that I get up, and told me that I was making the bus late. So I got off. The driver of the bus right behind the one I was riding refused to stop for me, so I had to wait 10 minutes for the next one.

This isn't the first time this scenario has played out for me. This isn't even the first time this week. I'm regularly harassed by parents with strollers. One guy even tried to fold me up in the seat, I guess thinking that I didn't understand what he was asking.

I reported the incident, but nothing will happen with that, and I'm getting awfully tired of dealing with this kind of crap.

Thus and so, my local transit company came to be featured in today's (In)Accessibility Spotlight.

On Mental Illness and Newtown

It's been a while since I've written anything, I just haven't felt like I had anything to say. Today I do.

We've all seen the coverage of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. We've all seen the speculation about whether or not the shooter had a mental illness of some kind. Austism and aspergers were mentioned. I do not consider people with autism spectrum disorders (autistics) to be mentally ill because of our brain wiring differences.

Perhaps he has been diagnosed with a mental illness, or with an autism spectrum disorder. Perhaps he was just a violent man. Perhaps there was something that society could have done to prevent this tragedy, gun control or better counseling services or many of the other things that are being suggested in the media and all over the internet.

Today I came across a blog post from a mother of a teenager with increasingly violent tendencies. One powerful quote from this post really resonated with me:

"When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people."

The problem that I see here is that people cannot get the help they need without a diagnosis unless they go to extreme lengths.  And really, do children with undiagnosed personality disorders or mental health issues really belong in prison?

The other side to this problem is that people with diagnoses sometimes get help they don't need, or are pushed to do so. I'm happy the way I am and there isn't really anything wrong with my brain, it's just different. I am, I feel justifiably, concerned that this latest wave of, again justifiable, outrage will lead to all people with certain disorders being tarred with the same brush, despite the extreme variance in presentation and behaviour, and perhaps even people being forced into treatment they don't need or want. There has been a huge increase in people saying that we're violent and dangerous, that we should be treated and fixed, and this is on top of the prevalence of people who think we ought to be aborted or sterilized.

So the problem here is ultimately with the diagnosis based system of access to necessary services. What if we changed the system to one based on needs rather than diagnoses? Would that be so hard? Perhaps then we could prevent all kinds of tragedies. 

Hierarchy of HIV Risk

I was unable to find this particular hierarchy of risk online anywhere as a graphic, so I decided to make one and host it here. It is based on the risk structure used by the Canadian AIDS Society. Sorry about the quality.

Adventures in the Hospital

Sorry for the radio silence lately, my life hasn't been that interesting lately. I was supposed to have a meeting with the bus company yesterday regarding their terrible customer service, but I had to miss it due to hospitalization. Whoops, bad timing, I know. The real kicker: I spent 16 hours in the hospital to hear "rest and take some painkillers". I went in with severe abdominal pain, I came out with less severe abdominal pain, a bump on my head, a bump on my "good" knee and a whole lot of frustration. This adventure has led to the following list. Presenting UtterRandomness' Grand List of Things That Are Irritating About Hospitals/Health Care:

1.  Hospitals that only staff one doctor in the ER. Really? One doctor? How about two? 
2.  People who complain about the Canadian health care system but are unwilling to pay higher taxes. You get what you pay for, and personally, I'd be willing to pay more in taxes for lower tuition and better health care. 
3.  Nurses who complain about not being able to find a good vein in a person who is dehydrated. Of course they couldn't find a good vein, they wouldn't let me eat or drink after I came in, and after I'd been there 12 hours, you better bet my veins would be hard to find. You could have at least let me have a couple sips of water. 
4. Nurses who lie to keep themselves out of trouble. I fell off the hospital bed, onto my face, while I was waiting for a CT scan. I passed out, probably due to not having had anything to eat or drink since 7pm Sunday, by this point it was about 11:30am Monday. The nurse had me sitting on the edge of the stretcher, completely alone. When I got back to the ER, the nurse who came in to check for a head injury asked me what I tripped over. I didn't trip, I fainted. This mysteriously never came to be entered into my chart. I had no intention of blaming the nurse, but some kind of acknowledgment that I didn't just trip over my own two feet would have been nice. It might have also been nice if anyone had tried to figure out why I fainted.
5. People who complain incessantly that people who got there after them were taken in first. Two things for those people: first, the triage process determines who gets in first, it isn't first come first served. Second, shut up, complaining isn't getting you anywhere and it's just annoying the people around you. 
6. No one gave me an ice pack for my head. :(
7. The freaking Weather Network. If you're going to keep me in a room for however many hours, please put something more interesting than the Weather Network on the TV. 

All in all, it was a particularly unpleasant experience. I do not enjoy coming out of the hospital with more injuries than I had when I went in. Anyone have any other hospital/health care pet peeves/irritations?

Why I Find Fifty Shades of Grey So Entertaining

The above picture shows the top three books on the New York Times Best Sellers list for this week in Combined Print and E-Book Fiction. The books listed are all part of the Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy. I find this almost infinitely amusing for many reasons.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read the books, nor do I intend to at any point. Hetero sex isn't really my thing, I don't enjoy it, I don't particularly enjoy reading about it. The fact that these books began their lives as  Twilight fan-fiction is a turn off for me as well, but I can see how it would appeal to others. No judgement here, just personal preferences. Now, on to the list:

1. Shelves upon shelves, and displays upon displays of erotic fiction just sitting in the bookstores. This book isn't hiding in a dark corner with all the other "dirty little secrets" it's completely out in the open. To me, this screams sex-positivity.
2. In addition to sex positivity, this also brings the concept of BDSM into more mainstream society. Again, it's coming out, physically and metaphorically, of shadowy closets and dark corners. I don't know how well the book portrays BSDM, but it could definitely start a conversation. 
3. This one is the one that gives me the most, possibly perverted, pleasure. People pick it up by accident! They choose it because it's on a display, because it's on the New York Times Best Seller list, and they get home and it's erotica! How awesome is that?!

BLEACH?!

I read a blog post today that made me sick to my stomach. Apparently people are giving their children something called Miracle Mineral Solution in the hopes that it will cure their autism. Cure autism? I'm okay with parents working with their kids on social behaviours and coping mechanisms, I'm even somewhat okay with medicating kids for things like anxiety that often come hand in hand with austism spectrum disorders, but I am not okay with people chasing down cures and being willing to subject their children to anything in the hopes that it will make them "normal." Normal... what does that even mean?

I'm not telling anyone how to raise their kids, parents of kids with autism spectrum disorders certainly get enough of that, but I am calling out any parents who are willing to make their kids swallow what is essentially bleach. You read that right, bleach. As in, make sure it's in a locked or unreachable cupboard so your kids can't get into it, very poisonous, bleach. Not only is it bleach, it's the bleach they use to make paper white. Any parents reading this that are considering taking such a drastic measure to "fix" your child should note that the FDA has released several statements regarding the dangerous nature of this product.

I find this terrifying. I can't even wrap my brain around the idea that a parent would be so desperate for a "normal" child. Do you seriously think your child thinks that it's worth swallowing or trying out every single bullshit cure that comes along? Is it worth it? What if your child gets sick? Do you really think that swallowing a potentially dangerous chemical will improve their quality of life? You know what improves a child's quality of life, not having parents that think that there is something so wrong with them that they're willing to chance poisoning them.

Unconditional love doesn't mean bleaching your child.

Today Life Sent Me A Good Reminder

Things aren't always as they seem, sometimes good things come in odd looking packages, all those clichés.

The tea pictured here, which looks sort of like scummy pond water, tastes amazing! It might be my new favourite.