Wounded by ‘Friendly Fire’

[Guest guest]

Subtitled: Hoodwinked by Toilet for the Disabled.

About a week ago I was at the funeral of a friend who succumbed to a

brain tumour well before her time and near the end of the service was

attacked by our old PLS friend, urinary urgency. Fortunately the church

was filled to overflowing and I was outside the rear doors, as were many

others, so it was easy to shuffle off to the toilet with my walker

without making a spectacle of myself. A guy who I used to car pool with

about 15 years ago very kindly came with me to open doors etc..

Not having been to this particular church before and being just a small

one out in the country I half expected that there would be no disabled

toilet. Surprise, surprise!! There was one. Getting in meant going in

through one door which my friend held open for me and then only about 4

or 5 feet further in was a second door, creating an ‘airlock’.

It very quickly occurred to me that this was another candidate for my

wife's triple D award - Disastrous Dunnies for the Disabled (dunny being

an Aussie colloquial term for toilet in case you weren't aware). Over

the years we have seen some toilets for the disabled that must have been

designed by architects whose idea of being disabled surely consists of

having a sprained wrist from counting all their money. We have seen

some absolutely unworkable ones for a person disabled by something like

PLS on their own with walker or wheelchair.

Having gone through the first door I very quickly found myself face to

face with the second door in the gloomy confines of the airlock. What

I did see was a nice big pull handle on the door with the word “PULL”

clearly written underneath it. “You have got to be joking!” I thought

to myself. After a minute or two of trying to pull the door towards me

and at the same time somehow get my walker past it in such a tight space

and get into the room with the toilet, I had promoted this toilet to be

a major prize winning entry on Jacqui's triple D award list.

My urinary urgency is inversely proportional to the distance from a

toilet – the closer I get the more urgent the need becomes. Here was I

now separated from my Holy Grail by a matter of only feet by a

ridiculously designed door set up - the need to go was becoming

unstoppable. In half panic I leant against the door to try to summon

inspiration on getting through it with my walker because there just

didn't seem to be room for the door to swing open and manoeuvre my

walker around it to get in.

A split second later I had the answer! Unfortunately it only came to me

because I was by then laying on the floor right next to the ‘object of

my desire’……… It turned out to my detriment that my nemesis the door

was bisexual – it swung both ways! As I leant against it, it of course

opened the other way so I fell in and went crashing to the floor. My

friend heard the clatter of the walker and I hitting the deck and came

running in to see me looking wryly back up at him from the floor

wondering about the stupidity of putting a “Pull” handle and sign on the

door of a toilet for the disabled when to do so left no room to

manoeuvre a walker past, let alone a wheelchair, and when the door could

be pushed and provide much easier access.

It was an ‘interesting’ lesson in the tribulations of being disabled for

him as I basically hadn't seen him since I had had PLS. Being now

around 60 years old and with me weighing around 190 lb. it was a bit of

a struggle for him to help lift me back up again. The fall was onto my

left side again but fortunately didn't hurt the left wrist I broke a few

months ago. It did hurt my little finger to the extent that I wondered

if I had cracked it but it came good within a day or two. The worst

thing was that I have bruised/cracked/broken a rib (or two or ??) and

that is still troubling me at times. The scary aspect is that I can't

have missed sconing my head on the toilet bowl by much and that could

have been very serious ……. not only for the bowl! :-)

And toilets for the disabled are meant to be on our side!

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,-._|\ Covington

/ Oz \

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