Tag: wheelchair

My walking frame and the beach

Summer is well underway here in the UK (apparently), and slowly my Facebook Timeline is featuring more and more pictures of my friends enjoying their holidays. Some jet off to far off places and taunt me with the photos of places I’d love to go. Others stay closer home which makes me equally jealous. It has been way too long since my last one, but that’s not the point I’m going to make here. Today, I want to talk about the beach.

Sand, it seems to me, divides people into two camps: those who love nothing more than lounging on the beach all day (and why not – you’re on holiday after all), and the people like me, who can’t stand it

I dislike sand for all the obvious reasons – it gets it your shoes, sticks to your skin after you’ve been in the sea, and blocks up the plug hole when you take a shower. However, it irritates me most of all because my walking frame just doesn’t like it. Place Martha (or any of my other frames, for that matter) on the beach and they just won’t move. The wheels simply aren’t big enough to plough through the stuff, and my wheelchair isn’t much better either. My family have figured out that if they pull it backwards on two wheels then it will move, but it’s very tiring for them so I feel really guilty, especially as the beach isn’t my favourite place to be anyway.

Then I have the option of walking along the shore, but I don’t find that great either. I can do it if I have a couple of people to hold me up, but the thing about sand is that it moves underfoot so I often end up hitting the deck anyway and getting covered in the stuff.  I don’t think I need to tell you how unappealing I find that. I still think I’d dislike beaches even if I didn’t have Cerebral Palsy because I suppose you could say they’re just not my scene, but I think that just makes me even less approve of sand.

Don’t get me wrong, I have played on the beach as a kid, and have some great memories (my personal highlight was the time that a seagull decided to follow my sister). I’ve played in the sea, built sandcastles, and collected my fair share of shells but that was a long time ago. These days, I find that I’d much rather sit by the pool with a good book (or four) and do the odd bit of swimming. The irony is I’d probably get a far better workout trying to stroll along the shore, but hey ho.

Disabled Toilets

First of all, I’d just like to say that I’m sorry about the lack of updates lately. My life has been a maze of appointments and the like. Ali who writes My (dis)abled Life nominated my blog for another award which I will be passing on next week when I’ve finished compiling my list of nominees.

So, today I’m going to talk (and possibly rant) about a subject close to my heart: disabled toilets. As far as I understand it now though, I think the politically correct term is ‘accessible  toilet’ these days.  I’ll probably use both during this post. Although. that will have more to do with the fact that I don’t want to use the phrase ‘disabled toilet’ over and over than anything else.

Now, given that I use my walking frame or my wheelchair when I’m out in public, I end up seeing rather a lot of these so-called accessible loos. The thing that I tend to find is that they’re either brilliant with tonnes of space and the sink and the toilet roll holder at the perfect height, or there are a lot that are quite the opposite. Well, with regards to my personal mobility issues anyway.

Often I find that a lot of them aren’t quite big enough and my wheelchair or walking frame take up most of the space inside and don’t give me a lot of room to move around it easily. As I’m sure you can imagine, this isn’t good if you’re trying to go in a hurry and I have to try and step over things. I find this quite hard and sometimes I trip over which really isn’t a good thing on a full bladder, trust me. It was even worse when I had my surgery a few years back and my mother had to come in a help me (I won’t go into details) but there was even less space then which made us both really, really stressed.

If I’m out and about on my own and I don’t have the option to leave Martha outside and just ask someone to help me walk in, I tend to have some loos that I try to avoid using for these reasons and try and remember where the roomiest (and also cleanest) ones are. I know that you’re all probably thinking that I spend way too much time thinking about toilets, and you’re probably right, but given that I don’t personally find many of them user-friendly I don’t really have much of a choice.

Don’t get me wrong I have seen my fair share of clean, spacious ones ( I even saw one with a hoist once,  but I really have only seen this  once in somewhere other than a hospital). I don’t feel that enough of them are up to scratch. It is because of this that I very rarely feel comfortable using the term ‘accessible’ toilet, when, in my view, many simply aren’t easily accessible to me without help.

Dancing with myself

In case you haven’t guessed by now, I love to dance. I’ll do it anywhere; at a family wedding in my room alone or in the middle of a park. If I’m out in public most of the time I do it sitting down in my wheelchair so that I don’t fall over or get knocked over by other people around me. If I’m somewhere that’s quite quiet I might have a go at doing it with Martha instead but that’s much harder.

If I’m in my wheelchair I sometimes attempt to roll my wheels around in time to the music but more often than not I tend to just go for moving my arms around in motions that I hope will match the music and try and avoid spotting my own reflection anywhere. I know that what I’m doing probably has no sense of rhythm to it but I like to pretend it does. Dancing with Martha is not quite as simple, I have to still hold on ad try and shuffle my feet and try and shake my shoulders at the same time. It’s not easy and I’d like to get better at it, I just need the space and time to practice.

The thing is, I’ve always loved bopping along to a good song. I’d always be begging my Mum to help me on the dance floor when I went to parties as a kid, I never even cared that I would be the only one up there. It was fun and that was all that mattered to me. It was always a part of family life when I was growing up. Mum and I would often dance around the kitchen and call it phsyio and Dad spent ages teaching me to strut my stuff to Madness songs like they do in the One Step Beyond video.

My friends often embrace my danc-y nature too. If we’re ever out and about somewhere and Rollin’ by Limp Bizket starts playing, the person closest to me will grab my chair and push me along in time to the chorus. Makes me laugh every time.

Now, I do often wonder what I must look like to people who don’t know me but I try not think about that too much and just enjoy the music. That’s what it’s all about, right?

So, what music will get you all moving today?

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be…

When I have to explain to people – especially young kids that being in a wheelchair isn’t as fun as it looks it can be tough, especially if the child is really young. Of course the idea of being able to sit down all day would seem like bliss to some people, but that doesn’t last and before too long most of us find ourselves looking for something to do and an excuse to move around a little. Not all people who use wheelchairs can choose just to get up and wonder around whenever they please, some can’t do that or would find it difficult. The thing that I find hard is how to explain this to children and young adults without sounding like I’m A) telling them off or B) trying to make them feel bad. It’s even harder when they actually use the phrase “I wish I was in a wheelchair”. I know that they can’t help it or don’t understand the true implications of what it means.

Usually I point out that there are ‘good points’ or ‘things that are fun’ about being a wheelchair user like getting to go really fast down hills, being able to help people carry their shopping by putting it on my knee while they push me or not having to worry about finding a seat when I’m getting a bit tired and need a rest.

Then, I have to try and explain the other side of it all like, if they were in a wheelchair they might not be able to do all the things that they like to do. They would be able to watch their friends go ice skating or rollerblading and they could have fun watching and sharing jokes with their mates, but they might go be able to put on a pair of skates and do the skating/rollerblading part.

In my opinion, I’m very fortunate because although I am a wheelchair user I don’t have to use my chair very often and instead use Martha as much as I possibly can. I’m not ashamed of my wheelchair and I’m more than grateful for having it on my bad days and days when I know that I’m going  to be walking around a lot. Sometimes I’ll get out of it and push it along in front of me if I feel like stretching my legs but I find this quite frustrating because I can’t control it very well being in front of it and I can’t get it across a road.

If I know that I need to give Martha or myself a day off then I will take my chair, I have no problem with that, but there are good and bad points to everything.

Here goes nothing…

My name is Nic and I think that I’m lucky. Over the years I’ve been called many things: brave, determined, courageous; or freak, lazy and other things depending on whom you speak to. But no one ever seems to call me lucky.

I was born with Cerebral Palsy, a physical disability that effects the way I move – mostly my legs, but more often than not my left arm and I have to have a stern conversation before it will do what I want it to. I usually win that one in the end. Eventually. I don’t know exactly what caused it but I was born fourteen weeks too soon and sometime after that I had a bleed in my brain. Going any deeper than this to find out what caused the bleed doesn’t really interest me. As far as I’m concerned I made it and that’s all that counts. I can still walk, talk and do a lot of things for myself – except tie my own shoelaces – that I’m still working on – but given that I’m twenty four I should probably just give up and focus my time and energy on doing something way more fun and worth the effort, like making endless cups of tea. That I can do, and if there’s one thing in life I love more than the awesome-ness that is chocolate, it’s tea.

Although I can walk by myself around the house I never go anywhere without my trusty walking fame (hence the blog name), or on bad day, my wheelchair. I don’t have the balance to get up curbs by myself and the shock of standing on an uneven bit of pavement would send me crashing to my knees so I choose to play it safe but that’s okay. Falling over isn’t nearly as funny as it sometimes looks. Although, the time I somehow managed to fall into the laundry basket and broke it was pretty funny, or the time I was a toddler reached out to grab the person in front of me to catch myself and ended up pulling the poor man’s trousers down (just his trousers – nothing more, thank you). Well, I’m told that was funny, but really I’m not so sure…

I also make vlogs on YouTube and you can check out my channel here. In the meantime, here’s my channel trailer for you all to have a look at: