TAKING THE DOG FOR A WALK

23.10.04


I’m home alone. Completely alone. I usually like this kind of loneliness and I encourage my parents to go and leave me alone. Today it feels different, because for the first time I understood how inconvenient this house is for me, despite being considered an accessible house.

Let me explain you what happens: The house has three floors, inclusive of the basement, where my room and other communal spaces are. In fact, it’s a semi-basement and this means that the front door is like in the ground. That’s why there’s a ramp that leads to the street in front of the house. I can’t slide my wheelchair on this ramp because of its big slope. Whenever I want to get out from the house and use the front door, I have to use the walking device and that’s why I stand up and walk. Whenever I want to go further, I use my car and that’s why I get out of the garage, whose entrance is as low as the front door, since it’s placed on the front side of the house as well.

Today all my friends were busy and I had to take the dog for a walk alone. How would I do that since I couldn’t walk out (holding the dog’s lead in one hand) but I couldn’t use the car/garage for the same purpose either? I passed my hand through the dog’s lead and held the bars until I could take him out on the street. And then what? Absolutely nothing. I had neither my walking device nor my wheelchair. I was just grabbing a bar, with the dog on my foot pulling me on his side of the street with persistence (poor dog, he was ready to fall apart). I explained to him that things were difficult. I asked him to shit somewhere at the end of the street (at the furthest point that he could reach with me holding the lead). But the dog is a dog and he doesn’t understand. I picked him in quickly and told him: ‘I can’t do anything else. Shit on you!’. I am mad at my parents, because every time I tell them they’ve neglected a bunch of things regarding my independent living at home they pretend they don’t get it. In fact, they try to do everything they can to prove that I will always be in need of them. I want to call them where they are and cry out loud to them. It’s just one of the many times that they neglect my needs. If I ever tell them that I dared take the dog for a walk, they’ll never leave me home alone.