Seeing the World From a New Perspective

Your perspective on the world changes when you suddenly find yourself mobility impaired. 

I broke my leg in Sweden 11 days ago. No exciting reason: I was on a simple hiking trail, my foot slipped on a boulder made smooth by so many people walking over it, the ankle twisted, and I ended up with a spiral fracture of the fibula. 

I was pretty down about the whole thing: 6 weeks of our upcoming trip to London were going to be spent on crutches. 

My mood wasn’t improved when we got to London and our massively overpriced apartment rental turned out to be a bit of a dive. I thought that for sure by now the Brits would have figured out plumbing, but apparently not. 

On the positive side, some inner instinct had led me to reject renting a much nicer looking apartment that was a 4-floor walk-up. Crutching up and down stairs terrifies me. Instead, we got one of the few places under a gazillion pounds that had an elevator. 

So I immediately started researching “mobility scooters,” and had one delivered our 3rd day in London.  

What a blessing it has been! I’ve been scooting around all over the place for the last several days, and much of the city is wheelchair accessible.

First Reactions to Scooter Life

 Things I’ve noticed since getting a mobility scooter:

1. Most people smile at you … if they notice you. Often they are too absorbed in their phone screens, and the onus seems to be on me to dart out of their way instead of the opposite. Being behind people looking at their phones is also super-annoying, because they don’t generally walk in a straight line, and often they stop with no warning, to get a better look at their screen. I’ve nearly crashed in to several of them.
2. You are at eye level with babies & toddlers in strollers. I like this, since I adore little ones. I sometimes think they are a bit confused to see someone so big who is also in a stroller-like device.
3. Construction workers don’t think about people in wheelchairs. On the positive side, most of the city’s streets do have ramps at each street corner. But you can go all the way down a street only to discover that the rest of the path is blocked off for construction, and there’s no ramp you can get down to get around it. These sidewalks are usually quite narrow, so you can’t turn around either; you have to back up the whole way. I hate this! 
4. You get to skip a lot of lineups. This is especially helpful in airports (where I had to rely on their wheelchairs), although at the end of a flight it can be a long wait till your wheelchair comes. It was also great when we went to a play-reading at the British Library the other evening. We were shown in first, and got prime seats. 
5. There are many restaurants, bars and stores that you can’t go into. Finding a pub without a step at the entrance is almost impossible. Luckily, the weather has been good so far, so we’ve been able to eat and drink outdoors. 
6. If you have “polar blonde” (aka grey) hair and you are in a wheelchair-like device people assume you are old. Even without the scooter my baby-faced, full-head-of non-grey hair husband is often assumed to be much younger than I am. (He isn’t, by the way!) But when you toss in the scooter too, you run into people like a server at a restaurant we went to who made a comment to DH (Darling Hubby) about finding “a good spot for your mother”! I gave DH hell for not having corrected him. But DH had a reasonable defense: he thought I hadn’t heard, and didn’t want to draw attention to the error, in case I hadn’t noticed. 
7. Designers and builders don’t always think things through. For example, as noted, we are in a building that has an elevator. It also has a level entrance and a retro-fitted ramp up to the elevator. What it doesn’t have is a handicapped door opener on the heavy front door. My solution so far is to wait until somebody else is going in our out of our building and then they’ll hold it for me. So far I’ve been lucky and not had to wait too long. 

(This article originally appeared at https://temastravels.com/blog/seeing-world-from-new-perspective)