8:36pm October 5, 2014

Nonverbal Problems #239138

So I’m not looking for advice, or what I could’ve done differently, or what I could do to prevent this in the future. I’m just trying to tell you what happened.

So I’ve started attending a class for caregivers. I count as a caregiver, they say, because I give emotional support about the dying process. And I promised not to talk about anything that actually happens in the class, because confidentiality. But this isn’t that sort of thing.

So I left to go to the bathroom, around the corner. This means going out the door to the conference room, through a small library, out the library doors, around a corner, into the bathroom. Emptied my drainage bag, which had suddenly filled to the point I was scared it was going to burst. Got everything cleaned up, went back.

Library doors are locked.

There’s a lady at the information desk.

There’s a guy at a podium thing by the information desk.

It is my job to convince them, using nothing but grunting and body language, that I need to go into the library, which is locked.

And they don’t believe me.

I point to the sign about the caregiver support group.

I’m walking with a cane, i’m nonverbal, and I’m wearing an oxygen tank, as well as a hospital admission bracelet. I don’t look like a caregiver.

And ever since I stopped using a wheelchair people see me as less cognitively competent. The wheelchair tells them my disability is physical and that all the weird things I do are somehow tied to a physical disability. Minus the wheelchair, they assume those things are from an intellectual or other cognitive disability. Which, actually, they are, they’re from autism, a developmental/cognitive disability. But yeah.

So anyway even the security guy with the key was questioning my right to be there, but we did get it figured out in the end.

TL;DR: When you’re nonverbal and look cognitively disabled it’s sort of dangerous to be anywhere alone because even if you get your point across by grunting and pointing and crap, people won’t believe you actually belong wherever you are, or that you’re competent.

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