Almost Alike: A Medical Cautionary Tale

Medical bracelet that says “Adrenal Insufficiency”.

I’ve been thinking about medical stuff a lot lately, so apologies if my posts tend towards the medical for a little while.  It’s what happens when you suddenly realize how lucky you are to be alive, and how close you came to death.  My father’s cancer has me thinking about life and death and medical care a lot, too.

In my dealings with doctors, I have found that they like the solutions to their problems to be neat and tidy.  In particular, they want there to be one diagnosis that explains all the symptoms they’re observing.  They want their patient to have that one diagnosis, and if their patient shows signs of more than one thing, it fouls up everything the doctor wants.

Case in point:  I had this neurologist at the headache clinic.  I told him that they strongly suspected my mother of having myasthenia gravis, or hereditary myasthenia.  Both are neuromuscular junction diseases that cause specific muscles to wear out quickly as you use them.  So for instance my eyes start out tracking the same object fairly well, but as time goes on, they drift outwards leaving me seeing double.  I had told my neurologist all about this, and about other muscular problems I’d been having.

I don’t remember why myasthenia came up, but I told him I was going to start on Mestinon, a medication that treats myasthenia.  His response was swift and a little annoyed:  “It’s not going to do anything.  I don’t think you have myasthenia.” 

“Why not?”

“Because people with myasthenia have trouble with specific muscle weakness. You have generalized weakness.  It’s not the same thing.”

He explained it as if I didn’t know this.  But he also explained it as if I hadn’t told him time and time again about the specific weakness, that was separate from the generalized weakness.  As if I hadn’t told him things were more complicated than he was expecting.

He offered to run an EMG but told me the results would be negative because “You just don’t have myasthenia gravis.”  I declined the testing.  I don’t like to be tested under circumstances where the doctor has already determined what the results are going to be.  Plus, I’d just been through an invasive procedure that left me in horrible pain for weeks, and I didn’t feel like being poked and prodded again.

But I did try the Mestinon, and it did make a difference.  It was subtle at first.  I could walk around my apartment without falling.  My eyes tracked things better, and for longer, before the double vision kicked in.  It was things like that.  The more Mestinon we added, the better those things got.  So it seemed my headache doctor was wrong, and there was something real about the effects of the Mestinon.

But in other areas, I was getting weaker.  In fact, as far as I could tell, I was dying.  I was hesitant to tell anyone this fact, because it felt like a fairly dramatic thing to announce.  But I’d known terminally ill people who had more energy than I had at times.  And I have instincts that tell me when something is going badly wrong.  Something was going badly wrong, and it went along with that more generalized muscle weakness.

I’ve already told the story of how I got diagnosed with severe secondary adrenal insufficiency.  And that’s what happened.  They found no measurable evidence of cortisol or ACTH in my blood.  When they flooded me with ACTH, I made cortisol, but not as much as expected.  Meaning my pituitary gland is not making enough ACTH to tell my adrenal glands to make cortisol.  And this was the reason for, among many, many other symptoms, my severe muscle weakness that affected my entire body.

I went into treatment for adrenal insufficiency and everything seemed to be looking up.  No longer bedridden.  No longer required to use a wheelchair for anything.  Not that I minded these things so much when they were happening, but it’s nice to be able to get up and walk up and down a flight of stairs when you want to.  It feels good to be able to exercise, after six years of bedrest.  Dexamethasone makes me feel alive again, instead of waiting for the next infection to kill me.   I feel strong, and sturdy, and robust, in a way I haven’t in years, and my friends sense the same thing about me.

The only problem?  Not everything went away.  I still had weakness in specific muscles.  I’d been referred to a new neurologist at the same time they were testing my cortisol.  This neurologist never pretended he had any answers.  He was simple and methodical in the way he worked.  He would come up with a list of every possibility, no matter how remote, and then he would run tests for every possibility.  This made me trust him in a way that I didn’t trust my migraine neurologist.  So I let him do any test he wanted to do.

Many of the tests, he came in and did them himself, which is unusual for a doctor.  Usually they delegate that stuff.  He did a regular EMG that turned up nothing, and I thought “See, my mother didn’t have an abnormal EMG either, so whatever we have isn’t going to show up on tests.”  Neither of us showed up as having the antibodies, either.  I began to think this was going to be one of those things that we never solved.

Then he called me in for something he called a single fiber EMG.  He was going to stick a wire into my forehead and measure something about the muscles.  I remember that on that day I had a lot of trouble even holding my head up on one side, and that I was seeing double.  He stuck the wires in, made me raise my eyebrows and move my eyes around.  There were a lot of electrical noises.

At the end of the test, he told me he wanted to see me as soon as possible because the result was abnormal.  The muscles were firing asynchronously. 

I didn’t know what that meant, but a week later I was in his office being told that I probably did have a neuromuscular junction disease after all.  Probably myasthenia gravis, possibly a much rarer hereditary form of myasthenia.

And to think that literally a couple weeks before I got the single-fiber EMG, my regular doctor and I had been discussing whether I really needed to be on Mestinon anymore.  We thought maybe my only real problem had been the adrenal insufficiency all along, and that my response to Mestinon might have been some kind of placebo effect (even though I don’t seem very prone to that effect even when I want to be).  Even I was starting to fall prey to that idea that a diagnosis is just one thing.

Right now, we don’t really know what exactly my diagnosis is.  We know for certain that I have secondary adrenal insufficiency.  And we are pretty certain that I have a neuromuscular junction disorder, and the most common one of those is myasthenia gravis.  (I’m just going to refer to it as myasthenia gravis for the rest of this.  Because it’s shorter than saying “the thing we think is myasthenia gravis maybe”.)

But the important thing — the thing a lot of doctors miss — is that there is not one diagnosis here.  There are at least two diagnoses, possibly more.  This is not the first time, and it won’t be the last time, that I’ve had doctors miss something fairly obvious because they thought that the simplest explanation is always a single diagnosis. 

I still remember back when I was dealing with three different diagnoses that affected movement in different ways:  Adrenal insufficiency, myasthenia gravis, and autistic catatonia.  And any time we’d try to bring up a symptom of one of them with a doctor, they’d bring up a “contradictory” symptom from a different one of them, and that would mean that… it couldn’t be myasthenia gravis, because sometimes I froze stiff instead of limp, because I also had autistic catatonia.   And it went on like that for years, where every condition I had was ‘contradicted’ by some other condition, so many of the doctors refused to see the complexity of the situation.

Sometimes that resulted in situations that were almost funny, but other times it could turn deadly.  There was a time I was hospitalized for aspiration pneumonia connected to gastroparesis, and my doctor refused to treat me for anything other than the pneumonia.  So I had collapsed in my bed after vomiting so much that all the muscles involved had gone limp and I was starting to have trouble breathing.  In retrospect we think it was the start of an adrenal or myasthenia crisis, and that I belonged in the ICU.  But at the time, the hospitalist simply refused to treat anything that wasn’t pneumonia.  So I had to lie there totally immobilized, delirious, and hallucinating, wondering whether I was going to survive, for days on end.  All because a doctor was only willing to think about one condition at a time.

Over the years, I’ve picked up an impressive collection of diagnoses.  Many of them are based on symptoms and my response to treatments.  But some of them are based on hard-core medical tests like high-resolution CT scans — things you can’t confuse for anything other than what they are.  I’m going to list the ones that  were diagnosed by those hard-core medical tests, and understand I’m listing them here for a reason:

• Bronchiectasis (high-resolution CT scan)
• Frequent bowel obstructions (x-ray)
• Central sleep apnea (sleep study)
• Obstructive sleep apnea (sleep study)
• Early-onset gallbladder disease (ultrasound)
• Exotropia (eye exam)
• Gastroparesis (gastric emptying scan)
• GERD – reflux (barium swallow)
• Esophageal motility problems (barium swallow)
• Dysphagia (barium swallow)
• High cholesterol (blood test)
• Hypermobility syndrome (Brighton criteria)
• Myasthenia gravis or related condition (single fiber EMG)
• Secondary adrenal insufficiency (cortisol test, ACTH test, ACTH stimulation test)
• Urinary retention with spastic urethra (urodynamic testing)

So this is fifteen different conditions right here, that there is no possible way that I don’t have them.  They’ve been tested for, the tests are valid, there’s nothing unusual about the tests I was given, they exist.  I’m diagnosed with a lot of other conditions, but even if we pretended that those conditions turned out to be misdiagnosed because some of the diagnosis was subjective… I’m still left with fifteen conditions here that are very much real.  Some of them are more serious than others.  But many of them are difficult and complex both on their own and in combination with each other.  (Also, many of them went years misdiagnosed because doctors refused to even test me for them, believing that a person with a developmental disability or a psych history couldn’t possibly be telling the truth about their own symptoms.)

Now imagine you’re a doctor, and I’ve walked in your door, off the street, with no medical history.  And I’ve got the symptoms of all of these fifteen conditions.  Some of the symptoms are severe enough to be life-threatening.  And your very first instinct is to try to find one condition that accounts for all of these symptoms.  You’re going to be looking for a very long time, and you’re going to be lucky if I don’t die before you figure it out.

Of course, it’s still possible that there really is one condition that explains all this.  Or at least, a small handful of conditions.  There are many genetic conditions that can cause problems all over your body, and they can be notoriously difficult to pin down.  But for the moment, we’ve had to diagnose all of these things separately in order to get a handle on how to treat them. 

It may be there’s some genetic condition that causes neuropathy (my mother and I both have symptoms of autonomic and sensory neuropathy), which could in turn cause the gastroparesis and esophageal motility problems (and dysphagia, and other things that aren’t listed above), just as one example.  But right now we don’t have that information.  Right now we just know I have gastroparesis, and that it doesn’t play well with reflux and bronchiectasis, and that if I hadn’t gotten a feeding tube in time it probably would’ve killed me.  There could also be something behind the adrenal insufficiency, but that damn near did kill me a number of times before we even knew enough about it to put me on dexamethasone. 

And that’s why it’s important that medical professionals not restrict themselves to a single diagnosis when they’re looking at what’s going wrong with someone.  If you see symptoms that look contradictory, then you ought to be wondering if you’re looking at more than one condition at once.

If there’s one thing I have noticed, having been in and out of hospitals for a long, long time… it’s that my roommates are usually people like me.  They’re people with multiple medical conditions all at once.  They’re not textbook illustrations of a single condition in all its pristine glory.  They’re a mess, just like me.  Like my roommate who had both Lesch-Nyhan and myasthenia gravis (and was a woman, which is rare for someone with Lesch-Nyhan in the first place).  They really treated her like crap, too — they wouldn’t believe a word she said about herself, unless they could verify it from some outside source, which they always did, but still never trusted her.  Sometimes I heard her crying after they left.  At any rate, I can’t remember a single hospital roommate who had only one condition, unless they were in there for a routine surgery.

Which tells me that those of us who end up in hospitals on a regular basis, at least, are people with complicated medical histories.  Not people who just have one simple thing that can be figured out.  Which means that no hospitalist should ever do what one of mine did and say “I’m only treating the pneumonia, nothing else matters, no matter how bad things get.”  I’m really passionate about this issue because I’ve seen how close to death I’ve come, how many times, just because everyone wanted my body to be simpler than it was.

Maybe the problem is that we train doctors too much on textbooks, and on the people who most resemble textbooks.  We don’t want to confuse them with too much, all at once.  So they grow to look for the one explanation that will explain it all, instead of the fifteen or more explanations that will explain it all.  And in the meantime, their patient could die while they’re waiting to get properly diagnosed.

And that’s the part that worries me.  I’m very lucky to be alive.  My doctors know I’m very lucky to be alive.  And I have a pretty amazing team of doctors.  I have a great GP, a great pulmonologist, a great neurologist, and a great endocrinologist.  These are doctors who are willing to listen to me when I know more than they do, but also willing to argue with me when they know more than I do, it’s the perfect combination. 

My GP has been here since I moved to Vermont, and he is known in the area as one of the best doctors around.  We have our disagreements, but he always explains his decisions to me, and I always explain my decisions to him.  We respect each other and that makes everything work.  He has done his best to stand up for me in situations where my social skills have caused problems with other doctors.

My pulmonologist is amazing.  She always anticipates situations where I’m going to face discrimination, and she’s always ready.  When she knew I was heading for a really bad pneumonia, she had my lungs CAT scanned to prove the pneumonia was there, because she knew nothing less than that would get me admitted to the hospital.  And even then it took all she and my GP could do to get me into the hospital and keep me there long enough to get me a feeding tube.

I’m new to my endocrinologist, but he’s clearly really good too.  He’s been helping me through the first stages of being diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency, including things as difficult as when to stress-dose and how much.  He’s given me the confidence to figure out on my own the amount of steroids I need to give myself in physically or emotionally stressful situations.  That’s a key skill you have to have to avoid adrenal crisis, and I think I’ve finally got the hang of it.

My neurologist is also new, but he’s clearly highly competent.  There’s nothing flashy about him or anything.  It’s not like he has some kind of flashy swagger like you see on TV shows.  He’s very quiet.  What he has is the ability to be mind-bogglingly thorough.  He listens to everything you have to say, he asks very careful questions, and he takes very careful notes.  Then he thinks up every possible condition that could result in the symptoms you have, no matter how rare or improbable it seems.  Then he figures out which ones are the most important to test for first.  And then he pretty much tests you for everything.  If there were two words for him, it would be methodical and thorough.  And it’s paid off — we now know I have something similar to myasthenia gravis, even though all the signs were pointing away from it for awhile.  Like my GP, he’s one of those doctors that other doctors hold in very high regard.  I can tell by the way they talk about him.

I wanted to make a point of talking about these doctors, because the point of this post is not to bash the medical profession.  These are people who have saved my life.  These are people I have built a relationship with over the years, or am in the course of building a relationship with now.  I’ve had plenty of truly awful doctors, but I’ve had a surprising number of truly great ones as well.  Most are somewhere in the middle.  But the great ones are the ones I owe my life to, many times over.  They have done things for me that, I am sure, they have never even told me about, and probably never will.

But all doctors, no matter how great, need a reminder that medical conditions don’t come in neat, orderly packages the way the textbooks make them sound.  Most disabled people and people with chronic illnesses have multiple conditions, not just one.  Often, these conditions have symptoms that can seem to contradict each other.  And even when there’s one overarching condition that causes all of them, there’s a good chance you’re going to need to find all the smaller conditions before you can put the puzzle together.  Many times, finding all the smaller conditions is a matter of life and death.  People simply can’t wait around to find the perfect most elegant answer when we’re going into adrenal crisis or myasthenia crisis on a regular basis.  Maybe there’s a reason I have adrenal insufficiency, and maybe one day they’ll find it, but for now I need to be on dexamethasone so I don’t die in the meantime.

Feeding tubes and weird ideas

My favorie BADD post: Tube-ageddon.

I haven't had much time to write anything here about the hell I went through getting my GJ tube. I had every indication for a GJ tube. I had gastroparesis so bad it was starting to affect my breathing, in a way that doctors said was likely to result in infection after infection until I died. From the emergency room onward, doctors were saying my best hope was to get a feeding tube.

Yet the pressure I got from doctors, while in the hospital for one of those infections, was to just keep getting infections, go home, wait to die. Most of them wouldn't say that outright. But some of them did. Some of them we confronted and they absolutely agreed that the only alternative to the tube was death — which could have happened to me by now, without the tube. But they still insisted on telling me not to get the tube, basically that I was better off dead than with a tube. We had to rally a bunch of people on the Internet to call the hospital before they suddenly changed their tune. My pulmonologist told me she could tell exactly when I started getting people calling the hospital, because the tone in my charts changed instantly to “let's get her the tube after all”.

Most people think of all feeding tubes as the same, all reasons for getting them as the same, and so they believe in false generalizations about their capacity to prevent lung infections, or indeed cause them. But they aren't all the same. They're all different, and the reasons for getting them are all different.

I have gastroparesis. That means my stomach is partially paralyzed. In my case it became severe before it was diagnosed last year and confirmed with testing this year. It's probably due to neuromuscular problems inherited from my mother, who has autonomic neuropathy among other things, a common cause of gastroparesis. My symptoms are similar to hers so doctors are assuming whatever we have is related. Anyway, it makes food remain in the stomach a long time. After awhile, this means that you can't eat very much and you drop a lot of weight. (I may still be fat, but they tell me by the end I was burning muscle.) by the end I was having trouble keeping down two small cartons of Boost a day, which isn't enough calories to live on. I was already on a liquid diet so there was no less food I could keep eating.

It also meant that the stuff staying in my stomach was riding up my esophagus again on gas bubbles formed by food sitting in my stomach for ages. I could feel it happening several times a day. I'd belch and food or bile would ride up with it. If this happened overnight, my bipap machine would shove the stomach contents down into my lungs from my esophagus. This began happening several times a week, and from January until March I had about five lung infections requiring antibiotics. I never stopped taking antibiotics, by the time one course was over I'd be on the next. Which is dangerous in its own right.

So when I showed up in the ER a few days after a CT scan showing what they called a “ground glass appearance”, they had no problem admitting me into the hospital, and even in the emergency room they were telling me if I wanted to live I needed a GJ tube. This wasn't news to me. They had been talking about a feeding tube since last fall, when one more nausea med added to the five they'd started me on, made me able to go home without one instead. I'd been discussing with my friends what kind of feeding tube served my needs best as a person with gastroparesis. And the GJ tube had always seemed like the best option.

A GJ tube is like a combination of a G tube and a J tube. Half of it goes into the stomach, which is a G tube. The other part goes into the first part of the small intestines, which is the J tube. The G tube gives you the ability to drain your stomach contents out into a cup, and dump them down the toilet. This means that if you do it often enough, you won't have anything building up in there and going up into your lungs. Right now, even bile and stomach acid can build up to dangerous amounts because of my stomach not emptying often enough, so I take acid reducers and I drain my G tube several times a day.

The J tube portion is the part that stuff comes in through. I eat through it. I drink through it. I get all of my medications through it. This means that nothing has to come in through my stomach. Which means we are bypassing the worst part of my digestive system. Not that the rest of my digestive system is wonderful. My esophagus is slow, my stomach is slow, and my bowels have been producing blockages since I was a teenager. But with liquid food going into my small intestine at a fairly slow rate (one feeding in roughly twenty four hours, I wasn't able to handle the twelve hour version without getting very sick) I seem to be able to handle things much better than when it was going in my stomach. I love it. It's so much easier than feeling horribly sick all the time.

I still take nausea meds, but half of them have been changed to PRN instead of daily. So daily I take Phenergan, Reglan (which speeds up my digestive system), and Marinol. And I can also take Benadryl. Lorazepam, and Zofran as needed. I used to have to take all six of those things every day, so this has really cut back on the amount of medication I need, which is good because every single one of these meds is severely sedating and it was badly affecting my ability to think straight. If I were still trying to eat, I would be taking every single one of those nausea meds at the maximum dose, and still wouldn't be able to eat enough to maintain my weight.

[Photo of me holding my tube. The J tube section is visible, the G tube is hidden behind my hand, and there's a little cloth thing from Trendie Tubies around the base, with owls on it.]

But I had to fight for this tube. Even though it was the only way to save my life. I had to fight against people who were certain I was better off dead. And I needed the help of a lot of people on the Internet, to do it. When I did get the tube, it was done without a working anesthetic. And even though the local anesthesia didn't work on me, even though I was yelling and screaming, they didn't stop to give me more, they just kept telling me that the Versed meant I wouldn't remember it later. Yeah right. It seemed like the entire process of getting the tube was one giant clusterfuck after another, and like people were making it as hard for me as they possibly could. (Later, when I had to get the tube replaced, we discovered that Propofol is the med, in combination with others, that really does the trick to keep me unaware of what's happening.) They treated me like a child, repeatedly expressing the fear that I would pull the tube out like young children often do, and blaming me when part of the tube got lodged inside me, probably as a result of over zealous physical therapy early on that was a clusterfuck in its own right.

But I got the tube and I couldn't be happier with it. I feel happier and healthier. After aspirating reflux several times a week for months, I haven't aspirated a single time in the month or so I've had the tube. My nausea is well controlled. My brain and body work better. Despite a couple complications since then, it's still the best thing medically that's happened to me in the past year. And I'm still alive, which even by now I might not have been if I kept getting infection after infection.

[The x ray showing the tube inside my body.]

Why did I have to fight so hard for it? I see two major reasons. One is that I'm perceived by medical professionals as someone whose life doesn't matter much, doesn't have much quality of life. I'm autistic, they read me as severely cognitively impaired, I am in bed all the time, they don't see that I enjoy living as much as anyone else does, and they make that decision somewhere in their heads without even noticing.

The other reason is the way medical professionals see feeding tubes. I've been trying to read the writing of nurses and doctors to find out their views on these things. Not just the horrible ones. The ones who snark at patients on their blogs. But the ones who think they're compassionate and sympathetic and good at their jobs. But in one area that makes no difference:

They all think of feeding tubes as the beginning of the end. They see getting a feeding tube as the first sign that your life as over. Possibly that you belong in a nursing home, as if anyone does. When I made out my living will, the first question of “Where do you draw the line where you want to stop living?” was whether I wanted to live if it meant I needed a feeding tube. They see people with feeding tubes as the first stop on the route to a living death. Other things they see that way are using a ventilator, having a trach, needing any sort of similar mechanical assistance to survive.

My friends see it a different way. They see me as some cool kind of cyborg, with the oxygen, the feeding tube, and the Interstim implant that prevents spasticity in my urethra, allowing me to urinate. They say the sounds my oxygen concentrator makes sound almost steampunk. But then all my friends are disabled, they see adaptive equipment as cool, and as a means to living, not a sign you're dying.

Medical professionals have been shown time and time again, to rate disabled people's quality of life lower than we rate our own quality of life. And yet time and time again, they see themselves as the experts on what our real quality of life is. One reason I try to keep my lungs and my guts in good condition is that as a person who is autistic and physically disabled, I know that if I ever got bad enough to need a transplant, I'd probably die. Because they would take one look at how I sound on paper, and they would decide my life wasn't as worth living as that of a twenty year old who wasn't disabled except for the effects of their lung problems or digestive problems. (Lung transplant is the end of the line for severe bronchiectasis. My bronchiectasis is mild, I'm working hard at keeping it that way. Transplant is also the end of the line for very severe gastroparesis combined with other gut problems. I'm hoping I don't get to that point despite severe gastroparesis. Given how hard it was just to get a feeding tube, which is the standard treatment when you start aspirating this much and being unable to eat even a liquid diet, I don't know that I stand a chance at making the transplant list should I need one.)

I also had trouble getting home. People were asking me if I belonged in a nursing home, or at least in twenty four hour care. I'm not sure why. It's not like it's hard to care for a GJ tube. It's unusual, but it's certainly easier than my old med regimen, which was truly difficult and time consuming. Now we just mix them up, put them in a syringe, and stick them straight into the tube. Easy. Eating is easier too, no more worrying I will throw up, and you only need to set up the food once a day and press a button on a feeding pump. But everyone has this illusion that it's incredibly difficult, and the VNA loves to take people with tubes and stick us in nursing homes claiming they can no longer care for us on the outside.

[The feeding pump on an IV pole with the food (Osmolite, low fat, high protein, no fiber) hanging above it.]

I still don't understand what the big deal is supposed to be. By the time you get a feeding tube, eating is really hard. Either you're having swallowing problems, or something is wrong with your stomach. In my case, my stomach was emptying so slowly that I was constantly severely nauseated no matter how little I ate, I was dropping weight way too fast, and I was aspirating reflux caused by all the food sitting around for ages. I was quite possibly going to die from repeated infections. How the hell is a feeding tube supposed to be worse than that?

I can't even begin to comprehend the fear of these things. I mean I literally can't do it. It makes no sense. It's all based in prejudice. It has nothing to do with the reality of a feeding tube.

I thought the worst part would be not being able to eat. The most I can do is drink a tiny bit of ginger ale, and I have to be very careful even with that. But I don't miss food. The feeding tube ensures that I am never hungry, and always have the nutrients I need. The only times I have ever started craving food, were two separate days where I spent all day at the emergency room unable to use my tube. Each time I came home and wanted to eat or drink something I didn't normally want to eat or drink. But when I'm getting food regularly, it's not a problem. I barely miss eating at all. I never even think about it. Even the vivid dreams I'd been having about all different kinds of food, all those months on Ensure, have gone away. My body seems perfectly satisfied with what it's getting, and it doesn't crave things unless I can't use the tube.

And it makes everything easier. Food is easier. Medication is easier. Absolutely nothing is any harder than normal. It's more like dealing with something easy and mechanical, than dealing with anything hard. We did learn the hard way to flush it with coke after every medication, because by the time there was a clog, you couldn't get enough coke in to dissolve it. So we are dissolving the clogs before they can even form, by leaving coke in for awhile after every single time we use meds. I've also discovered it's possible to reduce the pressure inside me — which can prevent the meds and water from flowing into me as easily — by relaxing my body, especially my rectum, and then everything usually flows in pretty easily. So there are a few tricks, but it has overall been much easier than my life was before I got the tube.

So what is so scary? I don't know. I can't find anything at all scary about this. It doesn't mean anything horrible. It means I'm alive. Being alive is a good thing. I don't fear death, but I only get one chance at life, and I don't want to die just because someone else has decided my life isn't worth enough to them. And so I'm very much interested in anything that will keep me alive longer, whether it's a feeding tube or any other “scary” device used for keeping disabled people around longer than used to be possible.

A lot of people I know have those devices, the ones that medical professionals think your life is over. Feeding tubes. Trachs. Ventilators. Catheters. Ostomies. Central lines. All those things that seem to scare people to death, even though there's nothing scary about them. They prolong life, not end it. And I'm furious at every single doctor who urged me to go home and die rather than get this feeding tube and get a chance to live longer. That is simply not their decision to make, and they were bound and determined to make it for me until I got enough people on my side to convince them that the entire world was watching the crap they were trying to pull.

I am going to work as hard as I can, to change hospital policy so that nobody gets pressured in the way I did. It's incredibly difficult to deal with pressure to die, when you're already sick and exhausted and have no energy to fight back. And they do it in sneaky ways, so that if I had been delirious or something, which I often am in the hospital, I might not have recognized what they were trying to do. My experiences are far from unusual, many disabled people have been encouraged to die rather than get a feeding tube, or a vent, or something else that would allow us to live. My mother, who has many of the same conditions I do, is going through a mess where doctor after doctor refuses to treat her or perform surgery on her, and she keeps having to go back to the Mayo clinic because they're the only ones who seem to be committed to making sure she can live as long as possible. And as a disabled senior citizen way below the poverty line, she gets the “your life isn't worth it to us” thing from at least three different angles. This stuff isn't unique to my life, the pressure to die is everywhere.

But most disabled people, like most people in general, prefer to be alive. Being disabled rarely changes that fact, not on its own. And the fact that anyone thinks we ought not to, that their pity goes so far as to be a death wish aimed at another person, is so disgusting I don't even have words for it. But they are the ones who are disgusted at my advance directive, which tells them to keep me alive no matter what. I can hear it in the sound of their voice when they ask me about advance directives. Advance directives are supposed to be about making your own choices, but the choice to live is the least respected among them. They would rather I not be here by now, rather I got my sixth, seventh, eighth infection until my lungs finally gave out. I refuse to give them the satisfaction. I love being alive and a tube doesn't change that one bit, in fact it makes my life better.

 

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A bunch of stuff that needed saying

The following stuff is important stuff I wrote elsewhere on the net. If some of what I'm saying doesn't make sense, ignore it, it's just context that I'm not able to describe right now. The main thrust of what I'm saying should make sense without understanding the full context of what I wrote. And I can't rewrite it all right now for this blog. So the following is pretty much as I wrote it. Also sorry for all caps in places, it was because where I was writing it I couldn't use other forms of emphasis. And please don't assume that this is all about autism. Everyone always assumes that everything I say is all about autism. It isn't. Most of it isn't. Not even the stuff that talks about autism is all about autism. I am fed up with just about every such assumption because my world isn't made up of only or mainly autistic people and when I talk about things I always get replies saying “This applies to people without autism too” and I want to say “no shit Sherlock, that's what I meant in the firs

This turned into a long post, and it may not apply to the people I’m replying too, but this conversation just brought up a lot of things I’ve been thinking but having trouble saying.

Thank you for writing that. It’s really important.

Also another point I want to make. There are many autistic people whose best method of communication is nonverbal. By which I mean, not speech, not writing. Some of us this is true of, can communicate well by speech or typing also. Some of us can’t. But we usually have trouble with receptive language — either some of the time, all of the time, or especially, during the early formative years of our lives. I’m one such person.

Most people don’t know this because the current theories of autism all involve us being terrible at nonverbal communication. By which people mean, terrible at one specific kind of nonverbal communication that most nonautistic people are good at. Also, most autistic people who can talk about their experiences in words, are (or believe themselves to be) bad at nonverbal communication, and their experiences get seen as applying to all of us, when this is not true.

So for many of us — nonverbal communication, and the world of things outside of words, are our best way of communicating. Whether we can also use words or not. I wrote about one such group of autistic people in my contribution (“Untitled”) to the Loud Hands anthology. Because I want people to know we exist. Because I want other people like me to know they aren’t alone, in an autistic community made up mostly of people who experience themselves as terrible at nonverbal communication. Where people even say that autistic communities are communities where people can use text or other forms of language, rather than having to deal with nonverbal communication. Even though there’s plenty of us who do better in person, BECAUSE we communicate best nonverbally, because words, whether we can do them or not, whether we are or seem good at them or not, are so hard and so difficult and so painful to keep using.

There are entire groups of autistic people out there who communicate with each other using our own unique forms of body language that are different from nonautistic body language, different from other autistic people’s body language, specific to ourselves, specific to each other. Who communicate best reading each others writing, looking for the patterns that exist between the words, rather than inside the words themselves. Who communicate best by exchanging objects, by arranging objects and other things around ourselves in ways that each other can read easier than we can read any form of words. Who share the most intimate forms of communication, outside of words, outside of anything that can be described easily, in between everything, seeing each other to the core of our awareness. Who see layers upon layers of meaning outside of any form of words.

In “Untitled” I was writing about my favorite communication ever, my video chats with AnneC (and her cats, when they show up, which Shadow absolutely loves communicating with me over video and reminds her every Friday at the right time because he loves it so much). I don’t necessarily do the best at visual stuff the way most people think of it. But I can see the patterns of movement in other people, including cats, whether or not I see them well in the usual forms of visual perception. And those patterns of movement tell me more than any word ever could.

I can even read nonautistic people fairly well at times — just not in the ways nonautistic people read each other well. That’s one of the problems with nonautistic research into autistic people’s abilities to understand nonverbal communication. Most of it relies on the understanding and use of words at the same time as understanding the nonverbal communication. And most of it relies on the kinds of nonverbal communication that nonautistic people are most aware of. This frustrates me to no end — how can people research forms of understanding that they don’t themselves have and therefore they don’t themselves understand even exists? I’ve actually told researchers ways they can research autistic people’s understanding of nonverbal communication without having to resort to the faulty methods they usually use.

And one researcher told me, when I asked, that every parent of an autistic child she ever met said that their child picked up easily on things like stress in the household, but that SHE ACTUALLY DISREGARDED IT UNTIL I ASKED HER, BECAUSE SHE’D BEEN TAUGHT THAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE COULDN’T READ BODY LANGUAGE. I’m totally serious. If researchers are that biased themselves, how can they possibly hope to even notice that we can understand things they assume we don’t understand?! I taught that researcher a bunch of very simple ways to test that without relying on the painfully stupid research methods that guarantee researchers will find only what they expect to find — relying on us to use and understand words, relying on our understanding of actors and stage conventions rather than real people’s real nonverbal communication, relying on nonautistic people’s limited ability to read autistic body language, all sorts of other flaws that seem obvious but that researchers themselves seem never to notice. So hopefully she will set up some real experiments that show our real abilities.

Anyway. Back to what I was saying. There’s entire subgroups of autistic people out there _ not just my own — who rely on nonverbal means of understanding the world, and nonverbal means of communication. That’s one reason I usually put myself in my videos — because I know that certain other autistic people will be able to read me like a book, even if nonautistic people usually can’t. And that nonverbal communication is a crucial part of my videos. (See why the entire first half of “In My Language” has no words in it. I was trying to make a point about the best way I communicate, the best way many people communicate, autistic or not, verbal or not. Mostly lost on people, who think it’s a video about autism. It’s not. It’s a video about communication and understanding and personhood, that happens to be made by an autistic person. Big difference. I told CNN why I really made the video, and they left out that part of the interview in favor of putting their words in my mouth. I think my real intent was too political for them.)

Anyway. I may be a writer, but my real best form of communication has nothing to do with words. I use words because I have to. Because most people won’t understand me if I don’t. I don’t use them because I like them, or because I “can’t do nonverbal communication so text is best for me”, or any of the usual reasons most people assume. If I could never use language again, spoken or written, I would be really happy. But the world won’t let me do that, so I carry on using a means of communication that is outright painful for me.

I don’t know the people in the video, but I know that the way their bodies move makes intuitive sense to me and communicates things whether they intend it to be so or not. (The forms of nonverbal communication I understand best are unintentional, in fact. That’s one reason tests using actors don’t work on me. I know an autistic woman who failed a test of nonverbal communication because it used actors and she kept describing their real feelings instead of their acted ones. What this says about nonautistic people’s understanding of nonverbal communication is… interesting.) Whether they are able to use spoken language or not, the video would lose a lot if it only relied on showing them speaking or typing the words.

And I really dislike a lot of the self-advocacy movement for relying mostly on the self-advocacy that happens through words, written or spoken. This leaves out people who can’t do either but who are nonetheless quite capable of advocating for themselves through their actions and movements. If I hadn’t spent a lot of my life forcing myself to do words, I might be such a person, so I am always aware of this. Words are not natural to me the way they are to some autistic people. They’re difficult and my development could have gone either way. There are also people who, no matter how much effort they put in, could never have used or understood words, and they are also extremely important, and they are also capable of self-advocacy, and they are still capable of communication that is more full of meaning than the communication of many people who use words.

I wish there were videos using their communication — which by definition wouldn’t involve words. Both people who would have been able to use words had they put in a crapload of effort at critical times in their development, and people who would never be able to use them no matter what. Such people exist. I sometimes wonder if they are too inconvenient for some autistic people to remember. I hate when people tell parents, “If you just gave your child a communication device they would be able to type words (or use picture symbols) and everything would be solved.” You don’t know that. You just can’t possibly know that. I hear that a lot, this idea that autistic people would all be able to communicate in words if only they were given a means to type them instead of speak them. And it’s so not true that its utterly ridiculous. I hear it both from people whose main way of communicating is speech, and also from people who use typing, and people who use both. It’s wishful thinking and it’s not true. There are people whose understanding of the world is just like a typical “aspie” except they couldn’t speak for motor reasons, and they are the most likely of those who use typing, to believe this myth.

Reality is that there are lots of people who will either never be able to use words, never be able to understand words, or both. Or whose use or understanding is so limited that they will never be able to use words as their primary means of communication. But they do communicate, whether the communication is intentional or not. And they do matter. And they are capable of self-advocacy. And they should be included in self-advocacy movements if those movements ever expect to represent autistic people, developmentally disabled people, cognitively disabled people, disabled people in general, whatever group is trying to represent itself in that movement. And in order to include them, you have to show their movements and their sounds and all the things they do that aren’t words.

It’s true that many people who are thought not to be able to use or understand language, actually are. And it’s terrible that they are overlooked. But in their desire not to overlook such people, many people claim that all disabled people who can’t communicate through speech fall under this umbrella. And that’s simply not true. In order to communicate with people who will never use words, you have to learn their language. (And surprise, that’s one thing that “In My Language” was actually about. And it would be about that whether I used typing or speech to communicate — either one would be my “second language”, and as such I can easily, easily envision a situation where I never learned and never would learn to use speech or typing, both of which I used at different points in my life.) And each person has one. Sometimes several people have a language that is in common but is not words. Sometimes each one has a separate way of communicating that is not words. But either way, you have to learn how they communicate, not force them to either communicate how you best communicate, or else be considered “non-communicative” for the rest of their life. And yes it’s possible to get consent to use their communication, it’s just sometimes harder work than asking a yes or no question in words.

And a community that doesn’t include such people isn’t my community. The developmental disability community is far better at including such people than the autistic community is, even though not all of the DD community manages it either. One reason I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with people who can’t use words in any form is because I’ve been in the developmental disability system for pretty much my entire adult life and have spent a lot of time with a wide variety of people. And I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with people who can’t and may never use speech or typing or even picture boards. And that’s something that certain segments of the autistic community are sorely missing. Even parts of the autistic community that involve people who don’t use speech, are often made up of only those people who were able to learn typing, and often put forth the (false) idea that everyone could learn typing if only they tried hard enough or were exposed to the proper teaching methods.

The response someone made is true: Some of the people in the video use typing, so they could never be shown speaking the words in the video. But I’d like to go further than people who use speech and people who use typing, because unlike a lot of people, my social world is made up of a lot of people who can’t do either one. And also made up of a lot of people who, even if they can use speech, typing, or both, those are not their best means of communication, and it would be better to show us using our best means of communication rather than merely the form of using words. Not everyone has words but everyone has a voice and a means of communicating. And not everyone who uses words sees words as their primary voice or their primary means of understanding things, and that needs to be respected. And I’m sick to death of spending time in communities where most people seem to miss these facts, and automatically see having a voice as the same as using speech or at least using language.

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“I’m the only one who can take care of you properly.”

“Do you want a full bed bath?” she said. “I'm going to be gone for a full week, and I know you won't want anyone else doing it for you.”

Uh-oh. I made a mental note to ask her other clients if this meant whatbi thought it meant.

I usually don't get an entire bed bath at a time because it wears me out. But that wasn't the issue. I have very sensitive radar for certain warning signals from caregivers. It's a survival thing. And I freak out a little at any hint of “You need me, I'm the only one who can take care of you properly.”

The weird thing about it is she's not even that good at her job. I mean she gets the basics done. But she does a lot of things that seem little and aren't, if that makes any sense.

Like she scrubs too hard, which causes pain and, for people with fragile skin, injury. She isn't able to control where she puts her hands. By which I mean she seriously thinks she's staying within certain bounds and she's not. Which means she gets lotion on my hands instead of just my wrists, which makes my eyes burn when I rub them later on. When she washes my vulva she goes all the way back to my anus despite attempts to stop her, which can cause infections. She can't aim properly when putting anti-fungal cream on, so my skin still burns when she's done. And no matter how many times I tell her to do otherwise, she tries to pull a towel out from under me before I have my pants on. Which can result in Desitin getting all over the bed sheets. She’s also one of the ones who inadvertently claws my vulva and thinks she doesn’t have fingernails.

More worryingly, she can be borderline abusive. You know how people slam cupboard doors and bang plates onto the table when they're angry? She does that to people. It's painful and alarming. She scrubs you even harder, slams your body around, and is generally rough with you.

Even when she's not angry she can be worrying in this department. On days when I'm unable to respond to her or move well, she treats me like I'm an object, not a person. And she can do the same things when in a hurry. It's like we are just things to her, not people, and the more severely impaired we seem to her, the more we are objects.

And she does a lot of things primarily for her convenience. Once she forced someone I know to stand up rather than get the bed bath he needed because it was slightly easier for her, and it exacerbated the injury that put him in bed to begin with. she didn't appear to care.

None of these are the attributes of someone who we all miss when she's not around. Let alone someone we feel we couldn't do without.

But her statement worried me a little. So I asked around. It's handy at times to live in a building where a lot of people have the same caregivers. Especially the people who bathe us, like her. They tend to be shared among more of us because they only come for the duration of the bath and any other personal care they provide.

Anyway, it was not hard at all to find someone who confirmed my suspicions more than I ever guessed. It seems that she has written it into her will that her pets are to be killed when she dies, because nobody could possibly care for them like she does. That's more of a warning flag than I wanted.

People have an obligation to our pets. And part of that obligation is to do everything in our power to ensure that they will have a good life if they outlive us. I know that Fey will miss me greatly, and I hope that she will not try to starve herself if I die. But I have plans set up for AnneC to find her a home or, as an absolute last resort, to take her in until she can find her a home. I would never have her killed just because I was dead.

To kill your pets when you die is selfish and reflective of a really disturbing and warped take on the world. Part of that take on the world is almost always “Nobody could take care of them like I do.” Which is also a huge part of the mentality behind a lot of animal hoarding and other abuse.

It works the same way with humans. “Nobody could take care of you like I do” always results in messed up behavior towards the person in question. It can range from minor abuse and neglect, to murder.

Parents who think nobody but themselves can take care of their disabled children are disproportionately represented among people who murder their disabled children. They often don't seek out help to take care of their children, and don't plan for a future when they are not around for their child. This means that even if they don't kill their child, they're setting them up for the awful situation the parent sees as inevitable after their own death. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever they believe, this is not love.

And caregivers who think this of their clients can be just as dangerous. At minimum they abuse their power over us. They may try to get us to see other caregivers as not very good. Even when they're better than the person in question. They frequently treat us like things, because to see someone in this way is to fundamentally see them as a thing. And at worst, they too can kill us.

I know a disabled guy who dated a nurse who had this attitude to her patients. He believes she was an “angel of mercy” serial killer who killed several of her patients. (Such serial killers are far more common than the Jeffrey Dahmer types, but receive little attention from the media or law enforcement. Their victims are only disabled people, after all.) She frequently talked about killing all her pets and everyone else who depended on her before she died. He realized she saw him in this way, and got out of the relationship fast.

I don't think that this caregiver kills her clients or anything. And I don't think I'm in any serious danger of more than being treated like an object by her, or else I'd never allow her in my apartment. But knowing this about her means I can be on my guard for more serious warning signs in case she does anything more disturbing.

But in general. Any sign of “Nobody can take care of you like I can” should put you on your guard. It nearly always results in something bad, and sometimes results in catastrophic abuse or neglect, or killing.

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“I don’t know that person’s program.”

That's a sentence I've heard a lot. And when they don't say exactly that, they say things that mean the same thing. Usually in the developmental disability system, for some reason, although I can easily imagine it in other contexts.

What it really means:

“DD people aren't like regular people. When people do things to them that would be horrible if they happened to other people, there's always a logical reason that justifies whatever is happening. Staff and case managers rarely if ever abuse power. All of their decisions have the best interests of clients at heart. So if something looks terrible, chances are that there's a reasonable explanation behind it. I just don't know what that explanation is. And I likely never will, so I'm not going to judge.”

They say this when staff scream at an old woman with an unsteady gait every time she falls, and refuse to help her get back up or allow her to hold onto things for balance.

They say this when staff publicly humiliate a man who clearly has trouble moving to avoid obstacles, when he accidentally bumps into someone.

They say this when staff do their best to keep a boyfriend and girlfriend apart. Or when staff are okay with boyfriend and girlfriend, but balk at the idea that two women with intellectual disabilities have fallen in love. As if it's even their job to decide who can love who.

They say this when parents simultaneously put on a big public show of wishing their son could move out on his own like he wants to, but sabotage his every attempt to do so. Because they had planned out a whole life for him in the group home they run, and can't handle the idea that he doesn't want to live under their control the rest of his life.

They say this when a staff person kisses a grown man's leg and says “I kiss you boo boo aww betta!” in baby talk.

They say this when, in the name of integration, staff prohibit disabled people from speaking or socializing with each other. I just saw an instance of that last one, which is why I finally remembered to write a post on the matter.

They say this when we get outright tortured. Tied down. Skin shocked. Slapped. Pinched. Made to smell ammonia.

I wish I could upload the scenes from real life that play out vividly in my head. But like as not, people likely to say these things wouldn't consider me a reliable observer. They never do, when you start pointing out the truth. When you see yourselves as people. With all that this means.

Suddenly you are either too severely disabled to understand what's happening, or you're not disabled enough to grasp why treating people like dirt is necessary. Or both at once. And they'd much rather you were highly submissive, maybe even the really cool type of client who helps staff out by giving them information about other clients.

All of this requires seeing DD people as less than. It just has to. There is no other way to justify these actions towards us.

And I know how people see us. As in, I know what we look like inside their minds. Sometimes we're human — almost, anyway. Not quite. There's something vitally important inside every real human. And to them, we either don't have it, or are missing large chunks of it. So we go around in human bodies but there's pieces missing in our minds and our souls. Even people who don't believe in souls in any religious sense, still perceive something inside us as only partial.

I know this because this is one of those viewpoints that isn't content to stay in the minds of others. It tries to force its way as deeply into us as it can manage. Until many of us look in the mirror and see only part of a person.

I can't describe the violence that involves. It's horrible. And a whole system of relating to us, forces its way into our lives. It tells us that we are taken care of, that we can relax, go to sleep, almost. And then it suffocates from inside. There's no words for it.

I suspect the drive to say this about people comes from several places at once.

If you work in the system, there's not wanting to see yourself or your coworkers or people who could be you, doing something horribly wrong. Much less on a regular basis.

I also suspect a strong desire to trust the society they live in, not to do horrible things to people. Or at least, not to do horrible things to certain kinds of people.

A member of my family once told me that it took him a long time to believe what happened to me in mental institutions. He said that in order to come to terms with the reality of the abuse, he had to destroy a strong desire to believe that the society he lived in was safe and just. Him telling me that was far more honest than a lot of people are.

That desire to trust society gets in the way of understanding every kind of injustice. I am amazed that people trust a society that does its best to shut out and destroy all but a handful of people. But they do.

And not seeing us as quite exactly people, is the one thing that you can't avoid if you think like this. Because if you see us as people, you have to see what happens to us as dreadful. And you don't immediately, upon being told of the latest awful thing, say any variant on “I don't know that person's program.”

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How to solve “behavior problems” without having to learn self-control.

Many years ago, meetings with my case manager tended to involve shouting and cussing. Mainly on my end. Today, our biggest problem during meetings is whether I'm physically and cognitively capable of holding a serious conversation at that time during the day. I would love to take credit for this by saying I learned a lot of self-control between then and now. But I suspect that even if I have, that's not what really changed things.

Like a lot of cognitively disabled people, I am not capable of keeping track of the dozens of things that have to happen for my basic needs to be met. And I really mean basic: Food, water, clothing, bills, hygiene, shopping, and medical care. Unlike a lot of states, the DD agency here only serves cognitively disabled people — you have to have an intellectual disability or autism, cerebral palsy doesn't count. So you would think they'd require case managers to be organized enough to meet those needs. You would think, but you would think wrong.

My case manager back then was a nice enough guy on a purely social level, but he was not an organized person. At all. So he was able to do a few things, but other than that he gave staff very little direction on how to consistently do what I needed. Meanwhile I was unable to even know most of what needed to happen. So stuff. Very necessary stuff. Lots of it. Wasn't getting done.

This meant that I pretty much lived from crisis to crisis, discovering a different gaping hole in my care each week. My case manager, having lots of power and being unwilling to face his role in these matters, kept telling me that these things were not his problem.

The more time went on, the worse things got, and the less he was willing to take responsibility for what was happening. So he blamed me. Nobody could possibly keep track of this many medical problems and appointments at once. I was unreasonable to expect basic care. There was no possible way to meet the needs of someone like me. I was the problem.

I kind of wanted to survive. So the more time went on, the more often I chewed him out for not doing his job. And the more frustrated I got, the more he treated me as if I was the one doing something wrong. Because hurting his feelings was worse than him forcing me to live in perpetual crisis mode. And it was perfectly reasonable to simply deny I had needs rather than work to meet them, right?

Towards the end, he began to get snippy and snarky. If I brought up anything he wasn't doing, he'd get this twisted smile in his voice and say, “Well maybe your new case manager will be able to do this.” Even I could pick up the implied meaning: that it was unreasonable and demanding of me to expect anyone to do these things, and I would soon find this out when I got a new case manager who would be just as incapable of keeping track of these things as he was. Then I would be forced to admit how impossible it was to meet my needs.

Except it didn't work out like that. At all.

My new case manager was a young woman. She was organized and efficient. And within a month or so, she completely turned my life around. I could finally rest, because I no longer had to keep a constant lookout for things going wrong.

And my reputation changed. Suddenly they considered me reasonable, polite, and civil. They acted as if I was the one who had changed. But I wasn't. What changed was my situation. It's hard to be nice — hell, literally fatal to be nice — when it's your life on the line, when there's a different crisis or three every week.

Yet that's exactly the position a lot of agencies force disabled people into. They don't provide adequate case management, and the outcome becomes our fault. We are forced to fight for basic necessities. When we do fight, they take that as evidence that we are capable of keeping track of our own needs without any extra assistance. We become not their problem.

From what I've seen, a lot of disabled people die this way. With help from friends, I've been able to catch situations like that. But not all the time, and not before the situation becomes dire. The amount of emergency room visits I used to have due to dehydration alone is astonishing compared to what I have today. It used to be routine for me to get fluids in an IV on a regular basis, because nobody was helping me drink water or Gatorade.

So the situation becomes this: If we don't speak up, they presume everything is okay, because if it weren't, someone would say something, right? If we do speak up, they presume everything is okay, because speaking up proves we are competent to track these things and direct support staff on our own. Plus,if we spoke up in one instance, then our failure (inability) to speak up in other instances means nothing's really wrong, because if it were, we'd say something. “You're such a good self-advocate,” they say, when they really mean “If there was another problem, you'd say it.” If we routinely end up in severe medical trouble, that's only to be expected given how many medical problems people like us have.

Needless to say, my being alive at the moment owes a lot to coincidence.

They also take signs of desperation as just happening, with no context attached. So our justified terror and anger become behavior problems, or psychiatric disorders. Or it's just part of who we are to be demanding or nasty. I'm still not certain my agency perceives the change in my behavior as a response to a change in context. They probably think I mysteriously learned self-control, or finally matured past being demanding.

No. My needs got met. That's a huge difference between that, and some kind of change on my part. If they went back to screwing me over and blaming me for the consequences, I'd probably go back to yelling at them.

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BADD: Caregiver abuse takes many forms

This is one of two posts I’m making for Blogging Against Disablism Day. Both are about caregiver abuse. This one is about misusing power in caregiving relationships. In particular, abuse that most people wouldn’t think of as abuse.

A note on vocabulary. Caregivers are called different things in different contexts. Caregivers, aides, personal assistants, attendants, staff, etc. Sometimes they also have more specific titles like LNA for Licensed Nursing Assistant. Regardless of how any of these terms are used outside of the disability world, every single one of them, in the context of disability, refers to someone with incredible amounts of power over disabled people. Not a person the disabled person has incredible power over. And that goes for even if we hire and fire them ourselves.

I get services from two agencies, a developmental disability agency and a physical disability agency. The DD agency calls caregivers staff. People from the physical disability agency can have all kinds of job titles depending on what their specific job is. The ones I see regularly are called LNAs. None of these terms are considered disrespectful by the agencies using them, or by the caregivers themselves. And when I refer to staff or LNAs, I am talking about people with huge power over me, not people subject to my own power. That will become obvious when I use events in my life to illustrate different abuses of that power.

I recently found this graphic developed by the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence and distributed by the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence. It’s called a Power and Control Wheel.

At the top, it’s labeled “POWER AND CONTROL WHEEL: PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AND THEIR CAREGIVERS”. Around the outer edge, colored black, are listed physical and sexual violence. The middle says “POWER & CONTROL”. In between, in grey, are various forms of abuses of power and control.

Since this is a graphic, and since the PDF file is kind of muddled in terms of the placement of lines that a screen reader might use, I’m going to transcribe what’s on the graphic and then provide examples from my life and the lives of people I know. But first, the graphic and the PDF:

A PDF of this file is available from the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence here. So on to descriptions of each section of the wheel.

COERCION AND THREATS:

Threatening to hurt the person; withhold basic support and rights; terminate relationship and leave the person unattended; report noncompliance with the program; use more intrusive equipment. Using consequences and punishments to gain compliant behavior. Pressuring
the person to engage in fraud or other crimes.

Threatening to cut off support is a huge one I see all the time. I’ve had people literally walk out the door in the middle of a shift without assisting me with vital things, just because they were angry with me. Or just because of things I can’t even figure out. Like more than once a person has come up behind me and startled me, and I jumped and shrieked involuntarily, and they said “That’s it, I’m out of here” and turned around and walked out the door. That’s basically denying a person disability services on the basis of the person being disabled, but it happens all the time.

Using consequences and punishment to gain compliant behavior is something that pretty much all institutions do, including the kinds of institutions that most people don’t call institutions. My special ed school was huge on that. And the consequences were things like being locked in a dark closet for hours.

I found it amazing that they listed the part about pressuring people to commit fraud. Years ago, I had a staff person who was very manipulative in general. He would do things wrong on purpose and then blame them on other staff, in an attempt to get me to trust him alone and to distrust other staff. I’d experienced that before, so I knew what I was looking at. He also claimed to have been fired from this job in the past because he was “just too political” about disability rights.

But the very last straw was one morning when he came in and explained that he had “connections” at the local hospital. He knew that I was having trouble obtaining a certain medication that Medicaid refused to cover. He claimed that if I was “already in the system”, Medicaid would have covered the medication because they only refused to cover it for people who weren’t taking it already. He told me that he could use his “connections” in the hospital to change my records in the computers so that it looked as if I’d already been taking it, and that then Medicaid would cover it.

The moment he was gone, I contacted my case manager and told him that I was afraid of this guy, and that he’d tried to get me to commit Medicaid fraud. The very last time I saw the guy, he must have seen the writing on the wall. Because he told me he was on the verge of being fired again for “being too political” so he was going to quit before they could fire him.

But one mistake they made was ever allowing him back into my apartment after I’d reported what happened. Caregivers can turn outright violent if they think you’ve reported them for abuse or incompetence. Not all of them do, but given their extreme power over disabled people, it’s dangerous to allow them to be alone with a client once they know they’ve been reported for abuse or that their job may be ending. I’ll get to an example of that later.

The times when people threaten to use more intrusive equipment have usually been when I’m dealing with the medical profession. I once refused to take a pill I was allergic to, and without even stopping to figure out why, a doctor threatened to stick a suppository up my ass. She wouldn’t let up on that and other threats until my power of attorney contacted Patient Relations on my behalf. In the psychiatric system, refusing medication often means being tied down and injected with it. There’s something very punitive about the way these systems handle someone not immediately going along with whatever they want.

I’ve also had people, both medical and otherwise, do things to me in ways that hurt. On purpose. That didn’t have to hurt. I once had a doctor order a blood gas not because I needed one but because he’d decided I was a bad patient. He pretty much said outright that this was why. My problem? Saying that his treatment for asthma wasn’t helping my breathing problem that wasn’t asthma. Because of him, they overlooked an infection that did permanent damage to my lungs. Other times it’s just a matter of providing the same services as usual, only in a violent way. It’s hard to describe the difference. It’s like there are gentle ways and there are violent ways to help someone transfer into a wheelchair.

There’s also the threat of being considered a bad client. The kind who complains too much. The kind who bans too many people from your house. I’ve put up with all kinds of things for the sake of not being considered that kind of client.

That includes sexual abuse. That’s another kind of abuse where sometimes it’s all about the way the person does things. In this case I needed to be bathed in bed and have different lotions appled to various parts of my body. And this woman… I can’t describe the way she did it. It was like a sexual caress. It was all wrong. And yet I put up with it every day because I knew that nobody would believe me, because the abuse was too subtle, because my sexual orientation would be called into it, because I would be told I was misreading social cues, all kinds of reasons. But mostly because I couldn’t afford not to get those services.

One of the worst threats to withhold care was explicit and came from a really bad case manager. Even though prior to coming to this DD agency, I had had one staff person for several years — an eternity in human services — he started spreading rumors that I was always refusing staff before I got there, and switching them all the time.

There were two people that I began refusing to allow into my apartment. One of them had a severe cognitive impairment that prevented him from understanding three-word sentences some of the time, in ways that directly endangered me. I reported this to the agency and he thought I was saying that as an insult. I told them I wasn’t. They told me nobody with a severe cognitive impairment would be allowed to work for them. Years later they figured out he had been hiding his Alzheimer’s from the company in order to avoid getting fired. I never got an apology.

But in the meantime, they didn’t know this. And there was this other guy who was constantly proselytizing to me. Two people out of dozens of potential staff.

Well they started telling me things like “Nobody really wants to work with you, you know.” When staff told me they liked me, this case manager would tell me they didn’t really, and that everyone hated working with me. He kept sending in the two guys I’d said could not come in, and telling me that if I refused them, I would not get services at all. And that he would write me down as unilaterally refusing all services from the agency.

Later he threatened to put me in this agency’s version of institutional care if I didn’t do what he wanted. I filed a complaint about all of this and more, and I won.

Back in California, there was an agency that had a policy of firing staff that clients liked, or pressuring them into quitting. Usually through blackmail, and setting them up to look like they were abusing people. Meanwhile, if any of us reported real abuse, they’d give that person a promotion. It was twisted but very deliberate on the part of two case managers who had the most power and who treated it like a fun game to mess with our lives. I’m not kidding.

One time, even, I reported one staff person for abuse. Later on, a very good staff person, well-liked by the entire company. Was fired for abusing clients. In the same, specific, way, that I’d reported the other person as doing. There was a client who couldn’t write for himself. So he’d dictate an email and they could write whatever they wanted. And so one day they wrote an email, as if from him, accusing the good staff person of abusing him in the same bad way as the person I’d reported. He had no clue what was going on when they fired her.

But anyway. Because of my role in reporting actual abuse. They refused to give me services at all. They blackmailed one good staff person into quitting a day before she was going to be fired. She refused to tell me what they’d done to her, but she was shaking the entire shift. They did this on purpose, because the next day was the day she would train the new staff person about what I needed them to do. This left me with a new, but good, staff person, who had to learn everything from scratch. This amused the case manager.

But then the new, good, staff person, was fired in the scenario I described above. And they just refused to give me services at all for months. This person ended up doing services for me all that time without much if any pay (she got a little from a different state agency) because she couldn’t stand what they were doing to me.

The way they did it, was they’d take careful note of things I couldn’t have in staff — for instance people who couldn’t lift wheelchairs — and then they’d say “We could only find a person who couldn’t actually do anything for you, so you’ll have to accept that or nothing.” It was really weird. At one point they deliberately triggered me into a meltdown, and then smiled at a (good) staff person and said “See what you made her do?” Then blamed her. It was a mess. But it basically all amounted to withholding services because I reported abuse.

CAREGIVER PRIVILEGE:

Treating person as a child, servant. Making unilateral decisions. Defining narrow, limiting roles and responsibilities. Providing care in a way that accentuates the person’s dependence and vulnerability. Giving an opinion as if it were the person’s opinion. Denying the right to privacy. Ignoring, discouraging, or prohibiting the exercise of full capabilities. Raising a hand or using looks, actions, or gestures to create fear. Destroying property and abusing pets. Mistreating service animals. Displaying weapons.

The very first time I saw anyone from the DD agency I get services from, I knew they were going to be trouble. I was in the parking lot before they were going to interview me for services. And what I saw made me nauseated.

A disabled man got out of a car. He banged his leg a little bit. The staff person swooped over to him and said, in exactly the baby-talk voice it sounds like, “Awwwww I kiss your boo-boo all better!”

I knew at that point that if they actually gave a shit about not treating people like children, she wouldn’t be working there, because she was doing it in public in a flagrant way that meant she’d had to have done it in front of people before.

And as an agency, they really don’t give a shit. There’s individual people who give a shit, but a lot who don’t.

The agency that really has problems with privacy, is the physical disability agency who helps me bathe. Yes, they normally see me naked. Yes, they normally clean my private parts in ways I can’t clean them myself. But that does not mean they should be allowed to deny me privacy in other situations. In fact, it means they should be giving me more privacy in other situations.

The big thing is walking in on me in the bathroom. I’ve never had much of a sense of body modesty. But when I learned that puts me at risk of abuse, I’ve been trying to learn it. This is not helped when people walk in and stare at me when I’m taking a shit. There is no excuse for that except in circumstances that don’t apply here. And yet if I complain to the agency about it, they’re puzzled as to why it’s even a problem. If I want to keep them out I pretty much have to lock the door, and then they’ll stand out there loudly complaining about how much time I’m taking.

The rec program from last summer was huge about treating people like children, making unilateral decisions, and all of that kind of stuff. We had to ask permission to do much of anything at all, and… I don’t even have the mental energy to go into everything that happened there. I already described it in another post.

Even otherwise good staff frequently make decisions about stuff without consulting me. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don’t, but people should at least ask.

And providing their opinions as if they were my own? That’s happened to me all the time. It’s made worse by the fact that people will talk to a staff person rather than to me. Then the staff person can answer on my behalf without even asking me what I believe.

ECONOMIC ABUSE:

Using person’s property and money for staff’s benefit. Stealing. Using property and/or money as a reward pr punishment in a behavior program. Making financial decisions based on agency or family needs. Limiting access to financial information and resources resulting in unnecessary impoverishment.

What usually happens with me is more subtle. Which is that people will spend money in ways that really screw up my finances, but nobody holds them accountable.

I have a friend who is very poor. She asked someone to send something by mail or Fed Ex or something, with whatever the normal fare was. They bought the most expensive option, like next day air or something, and brought the expense up to $100. She then didn’t have any money to spend the rest of the month. The person was never held accountable, and my friend didn’t have the cognitive or physical stamina, or money, to fight them in court or something.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people do similar things to me. Or they’ll spend over $100 on groceries without telling me. Which is why I now have a ledger system in place where people have to write down how much they spend. But it doesn’t stop people from spending it in the first place.

For someone without very much money, this is a huge deal. And yet there’s very little recourse, either when people spend too much, or when they destroy expensive property.

As far as using my property for their own purposes? I had this staff person years ago, who was always evangelizing to me about his religion. And was always trying to hold me to standards from his religion, when it wasn’t my religion to begin with. But then he began telling me things like “I provide these services for you, so you need to do things for me in return.” What I had to do in return, apparently, was use my printer to print off copies of a pamphlet regarding his religion.

I also at one point had been prescribed Vicodin after surgery. I didn’t use all of it. So a staff person started taking it. As in, taking it and using it. I couldn’t complain because I couldn’t afford to have her not working for me.

WITHHOLD, MISUSE, OR DELAY NEEDED SUPPORTS:

Using medication to sedate the person for agency convenience. Ignoring equipment safety requirements. Breaking or not fixing adaptive equipment. Refusing to use or destroying communication devices. Withdrawing care or equipment to immobilize the person. Using equipment to torture person.

I once lived at a residential facility that made a big deal about the fact that they didn’t use restraints or locks on the doors. What they didn’t tell people was that they used medication and behavior modification to ensure that there were restraints inside people’s heads. The same happens in a lot of systems that claim to be “more humane” than places that use locks and restraints. I’d far rather just be tied down, at least it’s honest.

I remember one staff person who had been great for years, and then something changed. Suddenly she began withdrawing support at random times, that seemed designed to hurt me and make me miserable. She made me sleep on the floor rather than on the only bed in the apartment. She would not allow me to lie down on that bed even when I’d just had a long airplane trip and desperately needed a place to lie down.

When I moved house, she refused to allow me any role in unpacking or deciding where my belongings went. And that was when I first experienced the part where she began messing with my head. She said, in a tone as if I had requested something ludicrous and impossible, “I am not going to sit here and ask you where to put every single thing!” I began to doubt myself so much that I spent years afterwards asking other staff people, “Is it wrong to ask for that when I’m unpacking from a move?” They all say no it’s not wrong, but I’m still afraid to even write this down lest someone tell me how I’m horrible to staff by expecting them to do things they shouldn’t be expected to do.

Then it started being things where I badly needed something. She had set things in front of the door so that only a walking person could get in and out, but you couldn’t get out in a wheelchair. When I asked her to move these things, way too heavy for me to move, she told me “I’m not your slave.” She convinced me that if I contacted my case manager about her not doing her job anymore, the case manager would see how ridiculous I was being to expect her to do things that she’d done for me for years without complaint.

She later told me that when someone is stopping any kind of relationship with her, she treats them like shit to punish them and to convince herself that it’s not going to be any loss to her. But that’s a really shitty excuse for what she did.

I don’t know who did it, but someone eventually reported her to Adult Protective Services. I don’t know what abuse they witnessed, but it was bad enough that a total stranger reported her. She blamed me and a friend, but we didn’t do it. She wouldn’t believe me when I told her we didn’t. I eventually did tell my case manager what was going on, and she was horrified and said I was not in the wrong.

And yet still. I’m afraid to talk about this. Because on some level I still believe that I’m an unreasonable person who asks staff to do things that they shouldn’t be required to do. Even though since then I’ve asked tons of people and they all said she was in the wrong.

Elsewhere I describe what happens when people outright ignore that I’m typing anything. But another thing happens sometimes. Where they’ll just say to me, “I don’t have time for this” whenever I try to say something. Or they’ll talk over me too loudly for them to hear me, since communication devices don’t usually go up to very loud volumes. There’s this idea that communication ought to be a privilege, not a right, and that I’m only allowed to communicate at times when it’s convenient to others. Or that I don’t get to communicate at all if they’re angry at me for some reason. This becomes even more of an issue at times that I need physical help using a communication device. People seem to think of communication in general as something that’s nice if there’s time but otherwise forget it. It’s all about whether it’s convenient to them, even though times when it’s inconvenient to them are often the times I most desperately need to say things.

MINIMIZE, JUSTIFY, AND BLAME:

Denying or making light of abuse. Denying the physical and emotional pain of people with disabilities. Justifying rules that limit autonomy, dignity, and relationships for program’s operational efficiency. Excusing abuse as behavior management or as due to caregiver stress. Blaming the disability for abuse. Saying the person is not a “good reporter” of abuse.

Caregiver stress is the one that stands out to me here. People have used it to justify literally everything up to serial killing of disabled people. (No, I’m not exaggerating. I wish I was.) And the public buys it. They buy that it is just so stressful to work with disabled people, that abuse is bound to happen. They even say this about murder, even multiple murders, even when the murderers outright admit they only did it for fun.

I’ve done a lot of research into the murders of disabled people, and autistic people in particular. You hear things all the time like “She shouldn’t be sentenced to prison. She already served 15 years of being the parent of an autistic child.” Again, I wish I was kidding.

And if people will use this to justify murders and serial killings, they will use it to justify any abusive thing that happens to a disabled person ever. And they do. All the time. This is one of many reasons that I don’t trust most campaigns for awareness of caregiver stress and burnout. I’m not denying that those things are real. But they’ve become so ingrained in public consciousness, that the instant a crime against a disabled person makes the news, all you hear is “It’s so hard to take care of That Kind Of Person, you really can’t blame them.” Coupled with a lack of focusing ever on the fact that disabled people get burned out from having to put up with caregivers all the time whether we feel like it or not, the usual ways people discuss these things start seeming one-sided and scary.

How bad is it? I know several people who have contacted rape crisis hotlines to report rape by caregivers, and been told outright “You have to understand the kind of stress they’re under, it’s very hard to care for someone like you. They really have your best interests at heart and you should learn to accept that.”

I have told people about things I went through growing up that nobody should have to go through ever. And been told that “being a caregiver is hard, you have to understand that”. As the very first response when I try to disclose horrific forms of abuse. There is no escaping this excuse. And it’s a terrible excuse but people buy it because the disabled person’s side of the caregiver relationship is not taken seriously at all. Even though we’re truly the ones on the wrong end of that power relationship.

Mind you, I know caregiver burnout happens. But any discussion of caregiver burnout has to draw lines about what it’s used to justify. I’ll buy that people will get irritable and snippy. I won’t buy that truly abusing and killing people is ever an acceptable response. Any discussion of caregiver burnout also has to acknowledge the other end, the end nobody talks about. Which is that disabled people get burned out on our caregivers. But that we have no choice but to accept care every day. We can’t take a break without danger to ourselves.

Some places have respite services for caregivers. There are no respite services for disabled people. Ultimately, even if it would make them feel terribly guilty, caregivers can walk away and abandon us without dying. Disabled people cannot abandon our caregivers without dying. That shows one huge power discrepancy in the relationship.

As for all the other things, they are pretty much standard practice in most agencies and institutions. Everything is set up for the convenience of staff and other workers, not for the convenience of disabled people. It’s rare to find a place where this is otherwise. And that means that if abuse happens, it will either be justified as part of the program, or someone will make up ways to make disabled people sound like we’re unreliable reporters.

There was a woman who was a client of the same agency I am a client of. And her caregiver literally would not allow her into certain areas of the house. She insisted that her client could not be home during certain hours. One day, she had a serious bathroom accident at work. Her caregiver refused to allow her to come home. This was reported to Adult Protective Services by her job coach.

The entire investigation basically involved the agencies finding “evidence” that this client was a habitual liar. APS decided that abuse didn’t happen and that the client was lying about it. You hear the same things when it’s sexual abuse. Dave Hingsburger said he went to a rape trial where the agency brought out all the different reasons this person could not be trusted. She tried to say “But I only lie about little things, not about something like this.” As I remember it, nobody believed her. But even when someone isn’t a liar, you can bet that once they report abuse by a staff person the agency happens to like, they will be made into one.

ISOLATION:

Controlling access to friends, family, and neighbors. Controlling access to
phone, TV, news. Limiting employment possibilities because of caregiver schedule. Discouraging contact with the case manager or advocate.

Limiting employment possibilities because of caregiver schedule is the norm for one agency I get services from. They’re the people who provide personal care, which includes things that I absolutely can’t go without.

I don’t have a job and will probably never have a job. But there are two hours a week I ask them not to come, and one day a week where I ask them to come before noon. That’s it. Two are essential meetings with my case manager. One is a day when, if I’m feeling up to it (which is practically never these days), I go to an art program.

I have been told, explicitly, and continually, that even just those two hours a week alone. Without the day when people can’t come past noon. That just those two hours are limiting them too much. That it’s not fair to the LNAs or their scheduler. That essentially if I am not available 24/7, then I have no reason to expect proper care.

They’re the only game in town for the kinds of services they provide, and they know it. So they are able, as an entire agency, to regulate disabled people’s lives so much that if we have jobs, or even a couple meetings a week, we can’t expect care.

As far as isolation goes, the recreational program I was in last summer did that in spades. I was not allowed to use the phone except when they wanted it. When I was extremely ill, like on the verge of needing to be hospitalized, I was not allowed to call my power of attorney for healthcare. And when I tell advocates that we were not allowed to use the phone whenever we wanted, that is enough to send off huge alarm bells. They also only allowed contact with my case manager if they were the ones doing the talking and I was merely in the room. If they didn’t approve of something I wanted to say to my case manager, they refused to tell her what I was typing.

I’ve also experienced a really peculiar form of isolation that isn’t listed here. It’s happened to me several times in several forms with abusive caregivers.

It’s where they try to prevent contact with people, but they don’t do it overtly. They just start dropping tiny little hints here and there, that friends and other staff are not trustworthy people. That they, in fact, are the only trustworthy person in your life. That other people are saying bad things about you behind your back. That nobody else actually likes or respects you. This can be done so subtly that you barely even notice until you realize months later that this is the only person you’re talking to anymore, and they’re being horrible to you.

Related is something I never see discussed anywhere either. Where someone who is incompetent or abusive in almost all other areas, will have one thing they do to make themselves indispensible. It may be working longer hours than they’re technically supposed to, at a time when you’re not getting enough staff hours to meet your needs. It may be cooking you the best food at the cheapest prices that you can possibly imagine. It really accomplishes two things. First, you won’t want to fire them because you’ll lose the above-and-beyond support they’re giving you.

But the other thing is more directly related to isolation. They do all these extra things for you, but they also start doing things to make other staff look bad. It can be deliberately screwing things up for you and then claiming another staff person did it. It can be simply lying outright about someone else’s ability to help you. It can be implying that nobody else would ever do these extra things for you. The result is to elevate themselves while putting all other staff down, and making it so you don’t want to communicate with other staff because you don’t trust them as much as you trust this person.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE:

Punishing or ridiculing. Refusing to speak and ignoring requests. Ridiculing the person’s culture, traditions, religion, and personal tastes. Enforcing a negative reinforcement program or any behavior program the person doesn’t consent to.

I would add to this one something that specifically happens to people who can’t speak and use other means of communication. I have communication devices that speak, but a lot of time I have used ones that don’t speak to save time and energy. This means that someone had to read the screen. Sometimes when staff have been angry at me, they simply refuse to read the screen. That’s a level above and beyond the ordinary silent treatment because it makes it impossible to say a word to them even when it’s important.

INTIMIDATION:

Raising a hand or using looks, actions, or gestures to create fear. Destroying property and abusing pets. Mistreating service animals. Displaying weapons.

The last time I had a staff person raise a hand to me, it wasn’t even my staff person. This is the story I promised earlier about what can happen once you start challenging a caregiver’s power, or once they know they’ve been fired.

In this case, the person was a friend’s staff person. She was really good, except for one thing. She could not stay out of my friend’s stuff. If you asked her not to, she’d either pretend not to hear you, or laugh like you just made a huge joke and do it anyway. In fact, even if she wasn’t already doing it, the moment you asked her not to do something, she’d immediately do it. And it was getting to be a huge problem, because she was arranging my friend’s stuff in ways that made it inaccessible from a wheelchair and impossible for my friend to get any work done.

Every time my friend got out important paperwork, for instance, this staff person would “put it away” without asking, even to the point of putting it at the bottom of a box stacked behind and under boxes that my friend was unable to lift. My friend asked me to come along to help her advocate for herself when she finally drew the line for this person. She wanted to simply not allow this person into her living room.

At first, she laughed and tried to go in anyway. When we made it clear we really meant business, though, she began screaming at us. And I really mean shouting at the top of her lungs. She said that she was going to leave and refuse to cook dinner for my friend, who is unable to cook for herself.

I told her that was a form of caregiver abuse and not acceptable. She kept screaming about how she was “NOT THAT KIND OF PERSON” and that I needed to leave, now, and that she was not going to listen to a single word I said. In practice this meant shouting over the top of my communication device, which can only go to a certain volume. I of course didn’t leave, because leaving my friend alone with a staff person who was that angry would have been a serious danger to my friend.

But neither of us were prepared for what happened next. She actually raised her hand to me and took a swing, stopping short only when her hand was two inches from my face. Then she held it there shaking. After we got her to leave, she hung out outside my friend’s apartment for several hours. She claimed that she was out there doing work for another client, but she didn’t have another client during those hours.

Yes, all of this was reported. No, nothing happened to this staff person. That’s what happens in the system, especially in the kind of agency (most of them) that protect staff and not clients. Even in things like murder investigations this is usually true.

She also seriously distorted what we actually told her, when recounting it to other people in the agency. The things that made her the angriest were when we told her that withholding food is considered a form of caregiver abuse, and that the things she was doing with my friend’s stuff involved a power relationship that she wasn’t acknowledging. We carefully explained why it is that people who have this kind of power, often don’t realize it. We went out of our way to explain why she might not have noticed this and that we knew it wasn’t her fault. When she repeated it to others, it was “They told me that I was an evil, power-hungry person who abuses disabled people for fun.”

This is also an excellent example of why a staff person should never be left alone with someone who has reported abuse, has let them know they won’t be working there any longer, or that kind of thing. This woman gave no warning at all that she was going to turn loud and violent at a mere request to stay out of a specific room. I tell staff to stay out of a particular room sometimes for all kinds of reasons, and have never gotten a response that intense.

So basically…

There are tons of different ways to abuse power, and this only covers some of them. But this is the best description I’ve ever seen of stuff that nobody ever even acknowledges as a problem. Hitting people and sexually assaulting them are not the only kinds of abuse out there, and in some circumstances they’re not even the worst.

Also understand — I’m not saying that all caregivers are abusive, or even that all caregivers who do a few of these things sometimes are “bad staff” overall. But it’s hard to have power and not abuse it. And people need to be aware that caregivers have this unacknowledged power. And that lots of them abuse it. And that very few people care. Getting services is not a walk in the park. You will inevitably encounter people doing all these things and more. And you have to be prepared.

Contrary to what most people believe, caregivers are not selfless, self-sacrificing saints who never do us any harm, yet shoulder a great burden that leads to burnout, which excuses anything they might do wrong. That’s not even true of the best ones. Caregivers are human beings. Human beings do a lot of bad things to each other. Especially people they have power over. Caregivers have that power. And it is not wrong to talk about it, to point it out, and to say that what some of them do is very wrong and destructive, and not excused by burnout or stress.

And I’m not talking without experience here. I’ve provided care for other people. And despite the inevitable stresses, you have to find ways of handling them other than punishing the person you’re supposed to be assisting. You also have to be constantly aware of your own power.

I’ve also had caregivers who, while very good in some areas, did some of these things. And I’ve had to make decisions about that tradeoff. Should I find someone who does things worse overall, but who does fewer of these things? Or should I stay with this person and try to work out ways to manage the things they are doing wrong? That’s a decision a person can only make for themselves, and doing some of these things doesn’t automatically make someone the worst choice in caregivers. It all depends on the circumstances and the people. But it’s good to know these things are wrong, even when you can’t seem to avoid them.

Not everyone even knows these things are wrong to do. So I have a printout of this chart posted in my kitchen, and have given one to my case manager for training purposes.

And here are the contact information for the two places that came up with and publish this stuff:

Developed by: Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence. 307 S. Peterson St., Suite 2, Madison, WI 53703. 608-235-0539. Based on the model by the Domestic Violence Intervention Project, Duluth, MN. National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence. 7800 Shoal Creek, Ste 120-N, Austin, Texas 78757. tel: 512-407-9020. fax: 512-407-9022. www.ncdsv.org.

Aspie Supremacy can kill.

A disclaimer: I don’t believe in real distinctions between aspies, auties, LFA, and HFA. When I use these words I am discussing the beliefs of people who do believe in them. Edited to add: aspie supremacy is a shorthand and people should be aware that the prejudice contained within it can and does affect many with the AS dx.

I think I am the person who coined the term autistic supremacy. At the least, I came up with it without having heard it before. It was 1999 and I came up with the term to explain certain trends to my psychologist. This, by the way, means that those people who are running around gloating about how us autistic activists brought these people’s offensiveness on ourselves, or ranting about how nobody cared until recently? They have no grasp of the history. None at all. I have been opposing this in all its forms for eleven years and know that others have been doing the same.

Others may use the terms differently and I don’t claim some kind of ownership over the definition but here are the ways I use these words.

Back then it was just a tiny number of people who thought this way. When I used the word, I meant people who went beyond just wanting equality. They thought they were better than nonautistic people. Not just in satire or jokes but for real. Some of them went even further and considered nonautistic people worthless or even worthy of death or being rendered nonexistent by (a distorted idea of) evolution.

A friend tells me this sort of thing is a normal, perhaps even necessary, part of a minority group’s journey to self-acceptance. Maybe, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Some people consider separatism a form of supremacy. I don’t, not unless the separatists are the ones with the power. A white separatist is a white supremacist and a segregationist. But when a minority (in terms of power) is separatist the reason is usually self-protection as much as anything. Sure, some supremacists become separatists but that doesn’t mean all separatists are supremacists. I am not a separatist but I understand the impulse to avoid those with the power to do you great harm.

When I use the term aspie supremacist I mean something more specific. I am referring to “aspies” who think they are superior to other autistics, or to “AS/HFA” who think they are superior to “LFA”. In practice this means, “We aspies are just different but autistics are defective”. “AS/HFA is part of human diversity but LFA has no value”. It’s the Carleys of the world cringing at the very idea of sharing a label with people who wear diapers (the joke’s on them as many “aspies” wear diapers too). It’s any and every way that the value and contributions of “AS” and/or “HFA” people a put above the value and contributions of “autistic” and/or “LFA” people.

Aspie supremacy is disgusting and despicable. I understand that all of us absorb certain cultural values but that is what makes aspie supremacy more dangerous than general autistic supremacy.

Autistic supremacy can do damage but it’s limited damage. They have neither power nor numbers on their side. They can rage on the Internet. They can cause damage to the few people around them offline. Even if one decided to cause as much harm to everyone around them as possible it would be tragic but in no way equal to the harm done autistic people all the time. Usually the most harm they do is getting people to believe that most autistic activists are like them. They just don’t have the power to do wide-scale harm.

But aspie supremacists… where to start. Their ideas are essentially very similar to the ableist society we all live in. A society that values “high functioning” whatevers over “low functioning” whatevers where the further you are from the norm the more “low functioning” they call you. Have you ever wondered why some of the people who hate autistic activists the most are often just as willing as the aspie supremacists to put AS/HFA in one corner and LFA in the other? To say “Maybe aspies are part of human diversity but Real Autistics ™ are defective?”. It’s because the aims of aspie supremacy are very close to the views of those in power. And to someone like me it’s a fricking slap in the face, and worse.

I am far enough from the norm that even my talents and objections do not keep me away from the idea of “LFA” and out of grave danger that puts me in. My body has permanent and life-threatening damage, the kind most common today in places where there are no doctors or vaccines, and all but forgotten in America. That’s because medical professionals have not seen me as a valuable enough person to treat. Once while I was beginning to go septic I heard one medical professional tell another I had the cognitive functioning of an infant (something I don’t believe of even people with the lowest IQs). I had no way to contradict him because I can’t speak and was too weak to type or do anything but squirm and wail.¹ I have heard professionals say out loud that my life was not worth saving, that I really wasn’t a person, nobody home.

This means I am vastly more in need of being seen as an equal than people closer to the norm are. This is the part that neither aspie supremacists nor anti-autistic-activist types ever seem to want to get: On average the further from the norm you are, the more it is literally a matter of life and death that your value be seen as equal with the people with the most power. (I know there is life and death stuff for those closer to the norm too but we are talking averages.) So aspie supremacy is a threat to my life in a way that general autistic supremacy is not. Aspie supremacy is telling those in power, “You are right about those auties/LFAs/whatever, but not about us aspies. Why don’t you just let us in to that big room full of valued people, and close the door in the face of those who need the protection of that room even more.”

Also, anyone who argues that aspies should be protected from institutions (of all shapes and sizes), aversives, unproven medical treatments, and the like, but that LFAs “need” those things? That it’s a tragedy when someone kills an aspie but understandable (and perhaps even preferable) when someone kills an LFA? You and anyone who listens to you is doing the exact same thing. The more vulnerable you are to the worst of the ways we can be treated, the more protection you need from the idea that it’s all worthwhile or understandable for you if not for the more normal ones. This too is reminiscent of aspie supremacy in different clothing. It’s all more and more devaluation and it’s endangering the rest of us.

I know that to many aspie supremacists it doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re doing. It feels like they are just stating common sense, that aspies have more valuable skills, more logic, less dysfunction, whatever, than other autistics. But that’s because having a bit of relative privilege renders them unaware of the full consequences of their actions. They don’t realize that they have things backwards — the more devalued you are, the more you need equality, the more you need to be considered another important part of human diversity, etc. Not the less. And “less” is what aspie supremacy ends up meaning to those of us who (even when we have some very valued skills in a few areas) are more vulnerable to devaluation and all of it’s effects. Including the lethal ones.

¹ Edited to add: When I say this I am not meaning to imply infants should be devalued. Generally when a medical professional makes the rapid judgement that someone “has the mind of an infant”, it’s a code word for “nobody’s home and we can do whatever we want”. This does say a lot about how infants are devalued.

A useful link

When Allies Fail

Something I would add is that when these sorts of things come up for any group of people (autistic people are far from the only ones, there is much culture and class-based stuff in there as well) whose normal way of interacting has been considered by those with power to lack “proper” social skills… when we get angry at people who perpetuate some form or another of prejudice or oppression is NOT the time to start lecturing us on how our social skills are atrocious and we need to calm down and be polite before anyone can listen to us. That is just adding a whole new layer of fail on top of whatever the original one was, and trapping us into a situation where we need to communicate in the same way those in power do before those in power will listen. (Which is false anyway. When we do manage to communicate in that manner we are usually ignored. Which means the insistence that we all communicate in that one way is just another way of not listening. Which is why it pisses me off so much when I see so-called allies demanding perfect decorum from those they are supposedly allied to. It’s really just another twist-and-turn of power play and will doubtless just cause a feeling of impotent rage in anyone it’s applied to.)

Still working on the cat posts. And right now lying back to back with a cat in yet another mode of cuddling.

Breathtaking to behold: talking back to dismissal

One of my biggest interests is the study of how oppression plays out, and how it is resisted, among communities that most people would consider minorities. (Note: Minority in amount of power, not in amount of numbers. So yes, women count.) Not some sort of study of victimhood the way some people would paint it, but rather how people resist becoming victims.

It is breathtaking to behold communities where enough people have worked out the way things work, that when they are hit with the usual forms of sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism, etc., they are ready for it. They have answers to the usual bothersome questions and comments designed to disempower them. Even if the people attacking them don’t understand those answers, they at least are told a lot of the same things by a lot of people.

It’s breathtaking because we haven’t reached that point in some of the communities that I work within, including the autistic community. It’s like we’re almost there, but not quite. So a small number of us end up sticking our necks out and a large number seem to either understand but not be able to articulate it, or else not understanding yet what’s going on.

This isn’t because we’re too autistic to understand (which is in fact one of those obnoxious power plays, rather than a reality), it’s because as a community we’re just not quite there yet knowledge-wise. It’s been like this for other communities in the past, it doesn’t have to be like this for us forever. I don’t always even have coherent answers to a lot of what goes on, because this is not easy work by a longshot, but I think it’s work worth doing.

What would be cool is if eventually we all just automatically understand what is going on when people say certain things to us, and from that understanding (plus some time for thoughts to congeal into words), know what to say and how to react. My problem half the time is understanding but not knowing the words.

But imagine that, if anyone ever told us…

…”You’re not really autistic.” or “You’re not really autistic enough.”

(“You just have Asperger’s,” “You’re too high-functioning,” “You understand your situation too well,” “You’re too articulate,” etc.)

…”You’re too autistic.”

(“You lack the empathy necessary,” “You couldn’t possibly understand,” “You lack theory of mind,” etc.)

…”You’re too much like children and confusing us with your parents, somehow.”

(“You’re just like adolescents rebelling against their parents without understanding why the parents know best,” “You’re just like small children who can’t possibly understand the adult world,” “You’re just like little children who want to do whatever you want and can’t understand why your parents don’t want you to do that,” etc.)

Etc.

…then there would be an immediate, coherent response to each one, explaining why this is not an okay way of treating us or viewing us, explaining how the misdirecting of other people when it comes to us works, explaining why this is not okay… voiced by enough of us at once that it would be harder to ignore than the current sporadic response to it.

We’re getting there. See Bev’s Are you autistic? and I repeat myself. But we’re not there yet. And it would be wonderful for a lot of us to work towards this until we are, until we can throw answers back at that stuff easily. Because I’ve been watching these comments thrown at self-advocates for ten years and they never truly change in substance.

[Note also that I’m not going to be taking comments that actually try to explain why those particular ways of dismissing us are actually real or good or right. So don’t bother. Because this blog is about how to work towards this kind of change, not about getting the conversation derailed by people who think we shouldn’t even be trying to.]