[Blindtlk] getting around a doctors office

[Gary Wunder]

Hi RJ.  I know you have gotten lots of responses to your original question.
While I think there is no right or wrong in terms of how you get around your
doctor's office, I think it is important to figure out that you can do a
thing by yourself first and later decide that you don't choose to do it that
way.  If I always take help, I never figure out that what I want to do is
something I can accomplish without an arm.  After I've learned that I can go
anywhere and do anything by myself, then I can make that easier choice
depending on the day, the people involved, and, in the case of the doctor's
office, the way I feel.  In some ways, given the posts that I've seen you
generate before, isn't it a healthy thing that your sister now thinks you
might have enough of a chance at independence that she's suggesting you do
some things for yourself? 

I've had the pleasure to help raise several children in my life, and
inevitably we go through this phase where they stop seeing me as the
protector and start seeing me as a person who needs protecting.  We have to
work through this, of course, and generally they get to the place where they
are more assertive about what I can do or should do then I feel like being.
It is a strange feeling to have a child laugh at you when you almost trip
over a curb, but liberating to realize that the reason they are laughing is
that they have taken you at your word about your ability to find it with the
cane.

There will come a time when all of these decisions get easier.  I don't know
that they will ever be decisions that you don't second guess from time to
time, but they won't always trouble you to such a degree.  Learning to be
independent can seem to come at quite a cost, but there is no better gift to
give oneself.

Gary