October 21 Disabilities Awareness Item

Friends

If you JUST want extremely useful information I think it would be nice for EVERYONE to understand, up-to-date info about service animals, please feel free just to scroll to the bottom and find the link there.

This item is dedicated to Service Python Friend who wishes to be held in the Light but in comparative anonymity. Service Python Friend will shortly have surgery to rid himself of a vile malignancy on his arm. Even though a spell of disability during recovery should be comparatively brief, Service Python Friend admits, basically, to being scared shitless. He also says he is a guy and guys are not supposed to get to show stuff like that.

Service Python Friend’s other notable concern involves tying his shoes during his recovery while one arm is comparatively immobile. I can relate. I remember wearing shoes I needed to tie one summer while I had my arm in a cast, but I have no idea how I got my shoes tied. I also remember sometimes being glad I had other footwear as well though Service Python Friend just does not seem like he would appreciate, say, Birkenstocks. Maybe I will see whether Service Python Friend needs some of those squiggly elastic laces little kids sometimes get to help them keep their shoes on.

I greatly esteem Service Python Friend and his ministry of mirth in the face of difficulty. Service Python Friend’s latest dispatch reports that he should be free of a vile malignancy and good as new by 2012. That is just in time for election season and getting rid of other malignancies in political life.

During the worst summer of my eye issues, as I was coming to Meeting week after week with a face full of various swelling and bruising, all of which my doctor got paid for, Service Python Friend suggested that what I really needed was a service python!

I demurred. A service python is definitely one of the better “I do not know what to say so I will offer something that might or might not miss the point, might or might not make the situation worse” suggestions ever. However, I don’t want a service animal that might eat the cat. Plus, people who have real credible, certifiable, certified service animals frequently have more than enough problems negotiating with cab drivers, other bus passengers, various kinds of public accommodations. the idea of adding interactions about a service python to all the other things one must negotiate when, for instance getting on a bus, just cracks me up.

Service Python Friend talks about his situation with the same wry comments he brought to my eye yuck; most of the time, I just crack up. I keep telling Service Python Friend he has to tell me if my laughter is too far beyond the bounds of good taste; so far he just tells me the dates of next increments of treatment. Then we digress, for instance about the current fashionable practice of having multiple people with various medical credentials quiz patients before medical procedures. What body part are we operating on? Which side of the body? What Is the problem? How did it occur? This is all well and fine if one’s body has just gone and grown a malignancy without asking permission; it’s plumb embarrassing if one has to keep saying to all and sundry that one has earned one’s trip to surgery trying a Stupid Kitchen Knife Trick or tripping over a crack in the sidewalk.

I suppose I could ask Service Python Friend whether he thinks there is any danger he will qualify for a service python himself. Instead, while he deals with temporary slightly disabling results of treatment, I am going to try the all-purpose conversational awkwardness evoker “oh, you have this problem, have you thought of….?”

If that does not work, I can wish Service Python Friend some surprising and uplifting increment of enlightenment comparable to my arm in a cast experience. During my summer of the worst eye yuck ever, I happened to get a short translation job involving a handwritten document and by far the WORST Russian handwriting I have ever seen—and it wasn’t just eyesight gone haywire. The document was undated but in the course of my work I learned it had been written when the author had his writing arm in a cast because of a fact material to the issue the translation was needed for. Suddenly all the problems with the handwriting made sense. Who would have known that my arm in a cast experience would wind up helping decipher effects of someone else having an arm in a cast?

I do have one piece of bad news for Service Python Friend. There is a small town in California where a woman with some kind of seizure disorder has a service snake or service lizard, I forget which. This service animal can detect some kind of indication that the woman Is about to have a seizure and send her some kind of signal she can use to regulate some of the effects. The local jurisdiction has enacted legislation decreeing that her service animal is entitled to the same considerations as a service dog in all public accommodations in the town. However, those chuckleheads in Congress just are not amused about thoughts of a service gecko, service chickens, or even trained miniature horses. As of last summer and regulations implementing the latest revision of the ADA, the ONLY thing that qualifies all the time as a service animal in public accommodations is a service DOG. A miniature horse sometimes counts too but there are extra regulations for that! In general the regulations are clear and categorical about many points:
http://www.ada.gov/service_animals_2010.htm


NO Service pythons! I hope Service Python Friend is not too disappointed.

In the Light.
(RantWoman)