I was in a lot of pain. By a lot of pain, I mean I was crying and periodically screaming. I don’t cry from pain usually. I didn’t cry when my gallbladder was well into emergency stage, I just went really quiet. If I’m crying from pain, it’s serious. And this pain (and related movement restrictions) was serious enough that a spinal tap was done when I finally did get to the emergency room, because it sounded to them a lot like meningitis. (Fortunately it wasn’t.)

Anyway, I was sitting there trying to string sentences together, while barely able to keep auditory comprehension going, and trying to push through all the pain-induced shutdown to actually talk to the guy. And I’d periodically get the wording wrong or scream in half-pain half-linguistic-frustration or accidentally interrupt him. He told me that he would not help me until I was able to “respect” him the way he “respected” me.

You know… usually, if, for instance, someone’s finger’s cut off, and they’re running around cussing and screaming and not being very polite, other people kind of grasp why they’re acting like that and don’t act like the person is being disrespectful on purpose. Somehow, if the person has some kind of disability label however, this becomes a “behavior problem”. I used to know a guy who went untreated for pain for years, with a dislocated hip, because he had a developmental disability and all the things he did because of the pain were considered “bad behavior”. They didn’t bother looking to see if he was in pain. Hint: Physical pain isn’t behavioral, and treating it as behavioral is a violation of our rights.

(And if I’m not tending to my blog enough, now you know part of the reason. Sorry about that.)