I am a Brain Injury survivor from a car accident; one beautiful April morning in 1986. I had recently moved into my first home away from my parents, and I was on track to create myself as a business professional. A bale of hay fell off a truck in front of me on the freeway, and onto my windshield causing my car to roll off the road, I crashed into cement construction materials. My car was beyond repair, a state Police Officer pulled me out with the Jaws of life. I was registered dead twice in the ambulance and admitted to the hospital in a coma. I spent seven days in a coma after approximately six years of extensive therapy and self improvement I felt was mentally ready to enter the world of the non-head injured again.
This blog relates to the reality of how the healthy respond to the unhealthy.
To those of us who have ever been sick, stuck in bed, unable to care for ourselves, disabled or handicapped; I am sure we are all aware of that voice when we are recognized as less than perfect.
Today I was gardening. I was dirty and sweaty. I had on an old pair of purple and bleach stained yoga pants and a newer T-shirt that has an advertisement for Guardian Angel Home Care. On the front of the T-shirt is a picture of a physically handicapped man who is on a ventilator and in a wheelchair. I thought nothing of it.
As I was gardening a stranger pulled up in my driveway. I dropped the clumps of dirt out of my hands and went toward the car, mostly to get my two dogs away from the car. The driver got out of his car. “Excuse my messiness,” I yelled in the direction of the car. “Oh no problem” said the man as he got out of the car. Once the man stood up fully and looked me in the eye the tone of his voice became kind of shrill and he began speaking in a broken kind of baby talk. My first thought was, gosh I hope everything is ok, the man said, “oh…no big deal….I will come back later…bye-bye.”
I went back to pulling weeds and began thinking, I wonder if I should have offered to help that man-he sounded out of sorts. I pulled up my t-shirt to wipe the sweat off my forehead, and then I saw the trademark and the picture.
At first I chuckled, the man must have changed his demeanor when he looked at my dirty hands, my disheveled clothes and the picture. I took a deep breath realizing the stranger in that car, in my drive way had spoken in a manner I recognized as what I hear when a person speaks to a child or someone who is unable to understand.
As I pulled up weeds and raked dirt I began to think of how common it is for a person to change tone of voice, even the words spoken, when a faced with someone they don’t understand.
Because I have worked in the therapy department as a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant/Licensed (COTA), for over 17 years I have tried very hard to speak in the same tone to my clients as I do to my co-workers. But I have been very aware of the change in visitor’s voices when they speak to employees versus the ill. The man in my driveway spoke to me in the same tone that a visitor takes when speaking to an ill person.
Being a professional COTA since 1992 and being a brain injury survivor since 1986, I know the sound of that voice. That voice of pity. OMG if I have ever used that voice to anyone over the age of TWO please forgive me!
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