4:35pm September 14, 2014

Impromptu assisted typing at a conference

Please see this post for why I am posting various stories about my experiences with assisted typing and other forms of assisted movement. Please don’t just randomly respond to this post without understanding why I’m posting it, and why I’m posting these stories separately instead of all together. (I don’t have the spoons to make one giant post.)

I was once at a conference where my body just completely gave out. I don’t fully understand what happened, and I honestly think someone should’ve called an ambulance for a possible stroke. But straight down the middle of my body, half of my body went completely rigid, and the other half went completely limp. I began being able to move the rigid arm, but I was only able to pound it up and down. I was not able to make lateral movements necessary to typing on a keyboard.

My friend who was there to assist me with things, saw what was happening and intervened quickly to help me type. The first thing we noticed was that my hand was trying to jam itself into the table. It took all of her strength to pull my hand up off the table. She had to grab my hand with both arms, brace herself with her entire body, and use her upper body to pull my arm up off the table.

At that point, she had hold of my hand and was pulling it backwards with all of her strength just to hold it over the keyboard. This gave me the ability to move my hand from side to side and up and down to pick out letters on the keyboard. She allowed me to do that, while restricting the motion of my hand so it wouldn’t just plunge back down into the keyboard or the table. This took considerable physical force on her part, it was clearly exhausting her entire body.

She could feel the difference between the automatic movement of my arm trying to jam itself into the table, and the deliberate movement of me trying to move my hand down towards the keyboard. So when she felt the deliberate movement, she let up the pressure ever so slightly, so that I could hit the key. The moment the key was hit, she would yank my hand back again as hard as she could (she was still stunned how much force it took), and then everything started all over again. It took a long time to type a very short message about having a migraine and not feeling well.

But I can tell you that in that case, my friend sent me no cues at all, she did not act according to what keys she expected me to hit, all she did was provide purely motor support to my arm so that I could move it around without it jamming itself into the table. According to witnesses, to every appearance it looked exactly like the kind of FC done in the early stages where a person needs support at the level of their hand. And that backwards pressure is exactly what facilitators are trained to give – they aren’t moving the person’s arm forward, they are pulling it back and waiting for the person to initiate a forward movement. There was nothing about it that looked any different, even though it was completely impromptu and untrained on her part. And I can tell you the typing was absolutely 100% my own, she had nothing to do with it.

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