No posts for a month! People keep asking me when I’m going to post again, and now seems like a good time.

Just over one month ago, I went out on my second trip on wheels. Since then, I’ve spent every weekend on wheels, and today for the first time wheeled to work. I’ve gained lots of strength, lots of confidence, and lots of wheeling knowledge and skill over that time. It seems like about a year ago since my last post!

I haven’t been making posts these days after each trip, because it’s just become… normal. Not to say that I’m about to stop wheeling because I’m not getting anything out of it, just the opposite! It’s not a huge event that requires planning and such anymore, it’s just something I do, head out on wheels. I should post more general-transabled-stuff, but haven’t really been in the mood to do so lately. It’ll come back to me (the wanting to write about it, I mean), I’m sure.

That said, going to work on wheels today was a big event for me, and a scary one. My workplace is very open and accepting of pretty much anything, and everyone’s used to me using my crutch[es], but I still worried a lot about what people’s reactions would be. At this point, I wasn’t worrying about any logistical obstacles, I’m good enough with all of the physical aspects of getting around the city on wheels that I rarely worry about that any more (except of course making sure places I’m going are accessible!). I headed in to work this morning, navigating through my neighbourhood to the transit stop near me (after getting up my front steps, which reminds me of how much I need to move), on transit to work, through downtown to work, and up to the office. I headed in a bit early, to try to beat most people in and reduce the amount of stress I’d have passing a bunch of people’s offices and cubicles on my way to my desk. Wheeling down the halls to get to my desk, I was actually less nervous than I’d feared I would be. As planned, the office was fairly quiet as I headed to my desk, and nobody commented until I got all the way to my desk. A co-worker 3 cubes down popped his head up and said ‘hey! you’ve got wheels!’, and came over to look at my chair. Working in a technical field as I do, the first question he had wasn’t really a surprise. ‘What material is that frame made of? It looks light.’. I almost laughed at having been so worried about the ‘oh my god! why are you in a wheelchair?’ questions, when I should have known my co-workers would be more curious about the technology and build of the chair itself. The rest of the day continued along similarly, with the most common comment I received being ‘good morning Robin’. Same as every other day. About the only acknowledgement anyone gave that something was different were a few ‘hey, that’s new’ comments, before going on to talk about work topics. I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction from all my co-workers, everyone treating me pretty much exactly the same as they always have. I’ll likely keep using my chair at work on worse days, and use my crutch[es] at work on less-bad days, rather than wheeling all the time. Though that said, I’m sure Marie will mention that this was my original plan with my crutches too, but that became an all-the-time thing. Time will tell, but I can’t see myself using my chair 100% of the time any time soon really.

The city I live in has a bunch of the downtown office buildings interconnected with tunnels, which makes it easy (especially while wheeling) to get between the connected buildings. Some of these connections aren’t level so there are elevators and lifts, some of which require keys (as certain kinds of lifts legally require training before you can have access to them in this area), so I had an appointment in the morning today to get said training and be issued a key to access the lifts. This was probably the part of my day I had been stressing about the least, as it was someone who didn’t know me, which I knew I’d be fine dealing with. The training was uneventful as expected (it’s a lift, there’s not much to it!), and I now have a key to access the lifts in the tunnel system, which will make getting around quicker and easier (as without a key, you have to wait for security to come and operate the lift for you).

That’s about it, I suppose. I’ve just been reading over my older entries on this site, and remembering back to the first time I went out wheeling, which was almost exactly 3 months ago today. It seems like years at this point, really. The notes from the first trip (point 6) refers to a half hour trip because of an out-of-service elevator, where I had to travel from one end of a mall to another to use a different elevator. That trip, that took me about half an hour 3 months ago, took me about 3 minutes this past weekend. That first trip out, I worried that I’d never get good enough at this to get out without being exhausted and in pain by the end of it. Now, using wheels saves me large amounts of energy. I’ve come a long way in 3 months, if I do say so myself.