Previously: The Waiting Room: Girls on Oxygen
Not long after we began exercising together, my husband looked at me and asked, with some degree of horror, “Is this something we have to do for the rest of our lives?” I told him that I understood regularity to be part of the whole exercise thing, and he actually shuddered.
But since neither of us is getting any younger, and my doctors want me to stay as otherwise healthy as I can to compensate for a progressive neuromuscular disease, we go.
We’ve never been too athletic, so it’s a mercy for us that the gym we use is populated almost entirely by other people connected to our local Tech Giant. In my experience, software engineers and those of us who love them are more apt to take part in sports whose names include the word “fantasy” than in a session of CrossFit. Most of us heaving ourselves back and forth on the elliptical machines wear baggy, many-years-old t-shirts promoting obsolete software products. Everyone ignores one another as much as possible while we’re sweating and breathing heavily about six inches apart from one another. This is the kind of gym for me.
The problem, though, is that everything I need—the women’s locker room, the cardio equipment, the bathroom—is upstairs. Up lots and lots of stairs.
I can’t really say I’m surprised. After all, the gym is a place that’s all about physical ability. It’s not as though the facility was laid out with the disabled person in mind. It’s an assumption of the building’s design that, if you’re “fit” (a term I hate, by the way) enough to shuffle along on the treadmill or swing some free weights around, you’re fit enough to climb a flight of stairs. Yet stairs require a whole different set of motor abilities, and they aren’t exactly a friend to many of us with disabilities both visible and invisible. If, for just two examples among many, you have foot drop (trouble lifting up the front half of your foot), or, like me, muscle weakness that makes your knees crumple beneath you at unpredictable intervals, stairs are both slow-going and dangerous.
Now, my gym does have a little Elevator of Shame that I’m sure meets the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but it’s a far cry from being a positive experience to ride. Using the clunky thing requires a trip through the mass of humanity swarming the downstairs athletic shop and a long wait while whatever freight task the elevator’s also being used for is completed. Once upstairs, it spits the rider out somewhere behind a coffee bar, where there’s perpetually and inexplicably a man vacuuming the same square foot of space without giving one damn whether anybody can leap out of his way before he trips her.
So stairs it is. On a good day, I’ll get a clear shot at the handrail, and I can make my way up, Jell-O-knees and all, without incident. On an okay day, I may have to climb, stair by slow stair, behind a toddler who’s just learning to walk. (Sometimes, my looming behind these kids frightens them. To the little guy who pointed at me last week and shouted, “Mom, I’m really scared of the lady,” my apologies.)
But on a bad day, I end up behind a pair or trio of women—often the same ones, though not always—who stop mid-flight and lean on the handrail for a lengthy confab. The scene is roughly the same every time: I clear my throat to alert these women that someone’s waiting behind them. I wait.
Eventually, I say “excuse me.”
The women look at me for a moment, then go back to their conversation.
“Excuse me,” I say again. “I need to use the handrail.”
Once, when I was very lucky, they moved without argument. But most of the time, the women take my request as an invitation to scoff and make icky faces at what I guess they take to be my lazy-cow-ness, and tell me to walk around them.
Sometimes I’ll tell them I can’t, and other times I’ll give them a look that would melt steel. Other times, I give up, shuffle around them and their overstuffed gym bags, and risk tumbling down to the tile floor below because there’s honestly a limit to how much confrontation you can take in one morning. Usually, I vow never to take the stairs again.
But then I take the stairs the next time, not because I have a deluded belief I’ll get any better at climbing them, but because I hope that one day, these women will have some kind of breakthrough of the imagination—that they’ll hear me say “I need to use the handrail” and think, really think, about what I mean. I’m waiting for it to occur to them that just because someone like me looks like she should be able to hoof it up and down a few flights without trouble doesn’t mean she is able. I’m waiting for the day that people think about sharing public space—even this ability-driven, ability-focused space that is the gym—with different kinds of bodies.
Tags: health, kelly davio, the butter, the waiting room
In these situations I love to take on a Lucille Bluth persona. Speak loudly to the management about “how great the handrail is on the stairs, for people who may fall down and hurt themselves, and, gee, that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen if the handrail was blocked by, oh, people… standing around the landing… Maybe a sign would help, too, I don’t know. You’re the professional gym stair-owners. Ha ha!” And then hobble-walk away for dramatic effect. 🙂
I’m laughing so hard I’m nearly in tears, Marissa. I am filing this approach away under “to use immediately!”
Or offer the congregating ladies twenty dollars to see a Star War.
I feel so angry on your behalf! I can imagine myself being inconsiderate and inattentive enough to stop mid-flight and lean on the railing while chatting, but I CAN’T imagine knowingly blocking someone’s access to the railing! With a dirty look, no less.
STEP ASIDE, people. MOVE ALONG.
It really is a bizarre thing, especially when there are lots of open spaces and seating/chatting areas that people could use. I don’t really know what possesses folks to stop there any more than they would, say, in the middle of a street. I have to chalk it up to entitlement and lack of basic awareness.
“STEP ASIDE, people. MOVE ALONG.” is my motto at all times… I am fortunate to not have any physical disabilities, but I fell quite literally head-over-heels down a very dangerous flight of stairs last spring, so I’m extra cautious on stairs anyway, plus I am suuuuuper out of shape and really appreciate the handrail when I can get it.
Also I live in NYC, and work on the Chrysler Building side of Grand Central and want to murder every single tourist that stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk when I’m just trying to go buy lunch or toiletries or whatever.
I would have hit them with my cane. You are a better person than I am.
Did anyone else get the song “Move, Bitch, Get Out The Way” stuck in their head after reading this?
I am so glad you posted this. I have more problems with going down stairs than going up them, but even on my not-bad days I use the handrail and go slowly, because the vertigo and inability to figure out where my foot is in space can happen even on good days.
Oh, what an important (and well-written) message. Thank you!
STAIRS ARE FOR WALKING, NOT FOR TALKING
Sorry, I really really really hate people who stop in doorways or at the top/bottom/middle of stairs. It is completely inconsiderate. If you’re stopping for a second to catch your breath because it is a lot of work to get up the stairs, that’s one thing, but stopping for a chat and refusing to move when someone says they need the handrail? You are a terrible person and I hope you mend your ways.
Because my mother has arthritis (and my grandmother had polio) I try really hard not to assume that everyone who LOOKS able-bodied IS able-bodied, and I don’t yell at people for moving slowly (though I may roll my eyes a lot) (unlike the jerk who was mean to my mother when she was slow getting off an escalator because she was trying not to trip), but my patience for people who have no situational awareness or common courtesy is basically non-existent.
There is a 175-step staircase at an Underground station I use a lot, and I can completely understand why people might feel the need to stop and rest (although I find stopping is fatal, because I never want to start again), but I am still surprised by the time I encountered a man leaning against the wall halfway up reading “Chinese for Beginners”. Why?
I’m actually in London right now, and was involved in a great swarm of people moving downstairs at Holborn station at commute hour yesterday (I felt like I was crowdsurfing!). This big guy to my left was trying to shove in front of me, so I tried to make myself small and let him pass around me. He looked at me and said, “you can’t just give way!” (Maybe I was supposed to shove back?!) I guess he and the guy reading Chinese for Beginners could be friends.
Ha, this was just one stop away from Holborn (Russell Square). Holborn can be horrible – you have my sympathies. (You can’t just give way? News to me.) Good luck navigating the crowds!
I can’t do stairs for some autoimmune neurological problems, and the little kids screaming and racing towards my ankles scare the hell out of me too. And I hate the “looks” I get for using the elevator everywhere, when I don’t “appear” handicapped. I wish people were more aware of different kinds of disability, and that everything isn’t always as it it appears.
PS I hate, hate, hate getting onto and around stairs for poetry readings. Stairs up to stages, stairs up to workshop classrooms, stairs, stairs, everywhere!
I'm actually in London right now, and was involved in a great swarm of people moving downstairs at Holborn station at commute hour yesterday (I felt like I was crowdsurfing!). This big guy to my left was trying to shove in front of me, so I tried to make myself small and let him pass around me. He looked at me and said, "you can't just give way!" (Maybe I was supposed to shove back?!) I guess he and the guy reading Chinese for Beginners could be friends.
http://sobadass.me/2015/02/17/to-the-woman-who-tu…
It’s extraordinary how people are ever so helpful to disabled people they actually know and so very rude to those they don’t. There’s a letter on a blog (link above) that you might appreciate.
http://sobadass.me/2015/02/17/to-the-woman-who-tu…
It's extraordinary how people are ever so helpful to disabled people they actually know and so very rude to those they don't. There's a letter on a blog (link above) that you might appreciate.
My mother had a disabling back injury when I was growing up, which made it very difficult for her to walk. I remember so many jerks who would hassle her about parking in handicapped spaces (*with her permit displayed*), and make rude comments to her when she got out of the car because she didn’t “look handicapped” to them. (Because if you’re not in a wheelchair, you must be totally fine, right?)
It’s been many years now, but I still have the same urge to crotch-punch them.
I always wonder what gets into people who decide that they’re defenders of parking spaces and need to hassle those who use them! I suspect that people with accessibility issues suffer a lot more from others snarking at them about their parking use than they do from anybody potentially misusing a placard!
"a major award"
Sorry, I couldn't help thinking of the leg lamp from "A Christmas Story". Maybe she could use it to kick them down the stairs…
<img src="http://i.giphy.com/5iJE9RQI3FkME.gif">
I always wonder what gets into people who decide that they're defenders of parking spaces and need to hassle those who use them! I suspect that people with accessibility issues suffer a lot more from others snarking at them about their parking use than they do from anybody potentially misusing a placard!
Athletic white man, 60ish, who can’t believe that on one of our 3 snowy weekend days a year, he had to wait for his favored gym equipment: “You could at LEAST wipe off the machine when you finally get off, if you’re going to stand on it when we’re busy!”
Me, gathering the alcohol wipes I use on the equipment *before* I can touch it, per my deal with my oncologist that permits me to keep going to the gym every morning before work as long as I don’t pick up a(nother) cold: “Well, I sanitize it once per use, just like the people who can afford to get a cold. I just do it at the beginning. Talk to your oncologist about whether you can bet your vision, mobility or life on the person before you.”
Him: “What?!?!!”
The story of how I made a friend at the gym who also has cancer…she’s happy to have kicked the O2 tank, & silently applauded as I walked off, at an appropriate pace.
Your husband shuddering put a smile on my face, since it is so similar to my view of having to exercise in order to maintain my health. That you are willing to endure this with regularity speaks volumes for your inner spirit. Even through all of the mean spirited behaviors exhibited by the women on the stairs and the token nod to the requirements of the ADA with the inconvenient elevator, you remain hopeful that people will change for the better. I find that kind of hope inspiring, and articles from personal experience like this can educate and encourage discussion. I wish you well on your journey and all the illuminating commentary, should give you even more hope for the future.
Are there any other major awards? The leg lamp is the only one I can think of.
Oh gosh, I also have a neuromuscular disorder (with the foot drop and knee crumpling and everything) and HATE it when people block the handrails on stairs! Or stare as I make my way slowly up, but I suppose that’s a different issue…