AI6YR BenHmm, I am curious how many wheelchair users are asking for AI- and drone-enabled wheelchairs.
IEEE: AI Aims for Autonomous Wheelchair Navigation
New chairs track obstacles while drones map the room
Taran Rampersad@ai6yr it's a fair question.
Most people who are wheel enhanced i know love their autonomy and agency, but I do not know how many would welcome this.
Maybe this post will find people want it.
I did a wheelchair experiment in a hospital once. Naval Hospital Orlando, my last day as staff there, I did in a wheelchair in uniform.
It's amazing how different the world is from that perspective. And that was one day. Not a life.
I should write about that sometime. You jogged that memory.
key/rowan@knowprose I would note that "a day spent in a wheelchair perspective" by abled people is a genre that's a little bit (a lot bit) overdone, but the difference of it being at a naval hospital in uniform might be different enough to give it merit.
the thing is exactly as you said, that that's one single day and not a life, and whatever insight abled people think that they get into the life of someone using a wheelchair is. minimal, and things that disabled people and wheelchair users have been shouting from the rooftops for years. so the idea is that abled people shouldn't have had to spend a day using a wheelchair to have these realisations because that means that the attention isn't getting paid to actually disabled people.
i don't mean to come in all hostile in your reply, just wanted you to be aware that these sort of things are often not taken well in the disability community.
@californiummm Fair enough. It's just less than 8 hours I was in it.
But there is a story before it.
You be the judge. I was just coming back to the thread to post this, which I will.
@knowprose i think that there's still an element of sensationalism in this, although you did good by only mentioning her wheelchair when absolutely necessary.
and i think that to post an anecdote of this, even anonymised, is best done with the permission of the person. obviously this was years ago and you don't have that. you're using her incident for your blog "fragment".
if it had been my incident and i came across it floating around the internet in the wild i'd probably be furious; i'm trans and had plenty of incidents of having to get into a gyn chair from my wheelchair, pre-transition. none of them are fun, even the ones where i'm semi-ambulatory and needed less help and only steadying, and the ones with men involved really, really sucked. even though you treated it with some amount of care, you are writing about something that is highly personal. maybe not for you, but almost certainly for her.
i also appreciate that you didn't come to any grand conclusions about the time in the wheelchair, but i retain my previous point: all you said is shit that wheelchair users have been saying for years. for ever.
i don't know a wheelchair user, and i know a lot of other wheelchair users, who hasn't felt invisible and expressed our frustrations at being invisible. online in some way, shape, or form.
but in typical abled person fashion, you're talking about your experience without acknowledging the experiences of disabled individuals. you add your own voice to a bunch of other abled users still saying nothing new.
i don't know what sort of response you thought you'd get with this; i'm going to be kind and not tear this to shreds in public on my other account, because i have a much larger audience there.
if you leave it up, as is, i hope you end up feeling like shit about it, because honestly, that's all it is, is white man thinks they're something.
@californiummm Well, I did not sensationalize in any way that I can see.
That might just be my perspective. And that might be fair from your perspective.
But as a writer, I was honest about it.
I will leave it up. And I don't feel like shit for, as a young imperfect hospital corpsman back then, being humble enough to learn and try to understand other perspectives.
I am not perfect.
Neither are you.
Here we are.
@knowprose clearly you didn't learn the part where other people's lives aren't for your consumption. in that case? enjoy your newfound publicity.
@californiummm Clearly you're upset about something.
And I don't think it's me.
I think it's what I'm trying to point at with what I wrote.
Did you read it?
@knowprose yeah i'm upset because a dude thinks it's appropriate to post about lifting a girl in a gown into a gyn chair; go fuck yourself.
@californiummm Incidentally, I am not white. I am decidedly beige.
@knowprose struck out and corrected.
HilaryI was a bit surprised and interested at how this thread developed
But having now read your linked blog, yeah, you are a dickhead. Based on EXTREMELY limited experience, you are trying to make this about you. Not about actual wheelchair users.
Don't do that and just fuck off nicely
@regordane i really try my hardest not to make baseless accusations, because that's more hassle than it's worth. but also honestly, "man tries to make it all about himself", who's surprised?
and again, there's no way he has permission from that woman to share that very, very personal incident. as i edited my post to say, why the fuck did he have to include the detail of the speculum when he had said pelvic exam?
sensationalism.
@regordane What would have been horrible would have been assuming I did know about it.
It's the fact that I realized I did NOT is the point.
But you take from it what you wish.
It was my narrative. What happened. And I respected that young woman like I did every other patient. And she, in that moment, taught me a lot more than being criticized for writing about it.
Be well.
@ai6yr I wrote it up.
It's long, but I think the back story is important.
I learned a fraction of a fraction of what it was like.
And it felt good to write. Lived experience feels that way expressed. I didn't do enough of that this week.
@ai6yr Well... one critic that was upset.
They've blocked me after some insults, which is fine.
I want to clarify my intent, though.
I wrote about trust. I wrote about who is seen. I did it from the only perspective I have: mine.
It's honest.
So if others have things to say, fire away.
But my intent was simply to write what I know.
@knowprose Huh, explain what "Semper Gumby" is. I had seen someone else post that and had no idea it was actually a military thing.
@ai6yr It's a play on Semper Fidelis. 'Always faithful'.
When I was in, 'Gumby' was that flexible children's character.
So particularly Corpsmen who worked with Marines would say in my era, "Semper Gumby': Always flexible.
It fits a lot of things, so it went beyond that boundary. Something needs to get done, it gets done however you can.
Had a Corpsman I worked with that was called 'Doc Duct Tape'. Semper Gumby. :)
@ai6yr I actually had a Gumby pin I sometimes wore in the field on my back so people could tell who 'Doc' was.
LOL.