You Want to Hear About Trouble?
Listen Up
The next time you see that old guy pushing the walker with the tennis balls on the ends and making excruciatingly small progress as he struggles to lift one leg at a time forward, but undaunted, as he continues on his path to the pet food aisle at the ShopRite, think about how terrible it is when you’ve discovered you were out of half and half.
Or when you order that sloppy, artery-filling, bacon, Swiss cheese burger, well done and dripping with jalapenos, and those fried onion rings and you have to let the belt out one notch or maybe two, when you’re done, and you just take eating for granted, after all eating is as natural as breathing, just think about how it’s a struggle and even a battle for people with oral hyposensitivity, meaning you can’t feel the food in your mouth, to fully chew the small pieces of a bologna sandwich all the while you are packing it into your cheek for reasons that befuddle me and you risk choking or developing aspiration pneumonia, all just from eating and maybe the person, an adult in his 50s, has to have his food pureed like baby food so he doesn’t choke.
And it’s just intuitive to most of us that we know we shouldn’t eat crayons, or small batteries or rocks so why would anyone eat any of those non-edible things. It’s not intuitive for people with a psychological disorder known as pica, a term that originates from the Latin word meaning a “magpie” from the concept that magpies eat almost anything. But this is about people, not magpies, and they have to be watched all the time because they obsessively might swallow hair (trichophagia) or feces (coprophagia), ice (pagophagia) or dirt (geophagia), and a whole range of other items. Pica may lead to impaired physical and mental development, surgical emergencies to address intestinal obstructions, nutritional deficiencies and parasitosis. The condition is most commonly seen in pregnant women, small children and people who may have developmental disabilities such as autism. So yes, enjoy the fact that you have no desire to consume hair, feces, ice or dirt, you are fortunate indeed.
Or maybe all you want to do is take a walk, not a long walk, but just the opportunity to be outside in the sun for a while and take in the beauty of the changing leaves, nothing extraordinary but simply peaceful but you are one of about 150,000 Americans with ataxia who have to be led by someone holding on to your gait belt because you cannot keep your balance and you know you are always that far away from falling and striking your head on the pavement. Or you need regular treatments to help you clear your lungs that fill up with fluid because you are confined to a wheelchair but you are a trooper and you try to have fun and listen to the You Tube program on Queen and taking a walk is about as unlikely as winning the Nobel Prize.
You marvel at the brilliance and the power of nature as the lightning illuminates the black of the night and the thunder makes you shudder but it’s a different thing is you are so deathly afraid of thunder and lightning that you obsess over watching the weather reports because you know that when you hear the first crack of thunder, you shudder and you want to curl up in a ball and hide or run into a closet and slam it shut and you are in abject terror because you suffer from a disabling condition called astraphobia.
Or you’re in a room filled with people laughing and talking but you can’t turn your head because it is permanently contorted and you can’t stand up because your back is permanently deformed and all you want is to be able to turn your head and see what everyone’s laughing about. You look like you are a prisoner in your body but you are fully aware of everything going on around you. Somebody else in that same room is trying to say something and people constantly say “what, I don’t understand you” and you keep repeating yourself and people still say “what I don’t understand you” before they just nod their heads as if they understand and you know they don’t and they try to politely get away from you.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 61 million adults in the U.S. live with a disability or one in four adults have some type of disability. That breaks down to 13.7 percent of people with a disability have a mobility disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs;
10.8 percent of people with a disability have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions;
6.8 percent of people with a disability have an independent living disability with difficulty doing errands alone; 5.9 percent of people with a disability are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing; 4.6 percent of people with a disability have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses; and 3.6 percent of people with a disability have a self-care disability with difficulty dressing or bathing. The CDC reports that disability is especially common in older adults, women and minorities.
This is all not to say that you shouldn’t enjoy that cheeseburger, your walk down the pet food aisle, the dramatic sound of thunder and the breathtaking beauty of lightning, just talking to people, all of those things that most of us take for granted, but it is humbling to realize how lucky most of us are and how many people have to fight so hard each day just to live. So stop complaining that you have to wear a mask at the supermarket or your child has to wear one in school or that the perfectly lovely sweater you ordered from Amazon still hasn’t arrived or your above ground pool filter isn’t working up to snuff or you can’t connect to your Gmail account or your allergies are acting up or somebody just used the last of the toilet paper or you stubbed your toe or you keep getting unsolicited computer calls or your dog had an accident on the living room rug or that the line is too long at the Dunkin Donuts drive-in or your phone is complete out of charge or you can’t find the remote.
It’s really not that bad.