@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.

@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.

https://realityfragments.com/2026/03/21/wheelchair/

@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.