How to behave yourself when you’re around a wheelchair user because for some reason abled people don’t know how to act when they meet a disabled person 101

quadriparesis:

– Don’t touch their wheelchair without their explicit permission

– Don’t push their wheelchair without their explicit permission

– Don’t move their wheelchair without their explicit permission even if they’re not in their wheelchair at that time 

THIS MEANS

– Don’t lean on their chair

– Don’t put bags or jackets on the back of their chair because you don’t wanna carry your stuff 

– Don’t sit in their chair if they’re not in it

– Don’t mess with their brakes, push handles, straps, wheels, or any other part of their chair

Here’s why not messing with people’s wheelchairs is important: 

– Most wheelchair users consider their chairs to be a part of themselves. My chair is my legs. If you touch my wheelchair, whether I’m in it or not, you’re touching a part of me. You don’t touch someone without their consent. 

– Just pushing us somewhere without our permission is like picking up an ambulatory person, carrying them somewhere, and putting them wherever you want. 

– You don’t know what kind of medical issues they have. Messing with the wheelchair of someone with spasticity or neuropathic pain or other issues can worsen them. Even if it seems like nothing to you, it could be an issue for us. 

– If I’m out of my chair and you move it away from where I left it, I am stuck there until someone brings it back. 

– A lot of wheelchair users transfer without thinking about it much, so if I go to grab my chair to transfer and it’s not there because you’ve moved it, I will lose my balance and fall. We get used to our chairs being where we left them. 

– Many custom manual chairs are very tippy. That’s intentional, it makes them very maneuverable. But adding even a few extra pounds on the back of the chair can flip someone over. You could cause them to have a head injury. 

You could save wheelchair users a lot of trouble and pain if you respect our boundaries. Our boundaries aren’t very different from an able-bodied person’s, if you recognize that our wheelchairs are part of our bodies and should be respected as such. 

TL;DR- don’t touch my goddamn chair without asking.