Miss Information's Adventures in Disability: The Second Thing
Second Thing: (see previous post for the First Thing)
What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker
Miss Information is terrified of public washrooms. She's had a couple of traumatic experiences. Toilet too low? Shoes without good grippy soles? An unexpected wet floor? She might as well just send change of address cards because she now lives in this washroom.
She also needs the grab bar on the right because her left hand is only good for displaying jewelry. One mall that Miss Information visits regularly has 1000 toilets and exactly 1 with the right configuration.
So once she finds one that works she's loyal. Like the one at a local coffee shop. She'd met friends there and then they were going to shop up the street. Miss Information had no experience with the washrooms "up the street" so she better go now, right? She tells her friends she'll meet them and goes to the washroom area.
The coffee shop has 2 toilets. Miss Information's lucky bathroom is occupied. The other one has the grab bar on the left. Also the toilet itself looks clogged. She backs out and now there's another woman waiting.
Miss Information talks to her and explains the situation--about the clog, not the grab bar. Suddenly the the other washroom is vacated. Miss Information announces she's using it. The other woman says she really needs to pee and yeah, Miss Information says she'll be quick which is an outright lie. All the tranferring out of and into the wheelchair takes longer. The woman says ok. She'll just pee in the clogged one. Ew.
Things go pretty well for Miss Information until she goes to flush.
It has one of those flusher things with a long metal handle you push or pull. Miss Information remembers them from kindergarten. But she's done this before so what could go wrong?
What went wrong: she pushed to flush and when the handle went back up it pinched the skin on her pinkie finger. It really hurt and there was a lot of blood. She washed it, wrapped it up and went up the street to meet her friends no doubt leaving a trail of blood in her wake.
When she got back home she unwrapped her finger and took a good look. No cut. The toilet flusher had just ripped an entire section of skin off. No wonder it hurt so much. She went to the residence's nurse for professional bandaging. For some reason the medical office had no antiseptic but she cleaned and bandaged the injury.
But hey! Miss Information rebandaged it herself--something of a miracle for a woman with only 3 working fingers to put a bandage on the fourth.
