Around age 40, when complete independence was no longer feasible for me, my search for an assisted living place to live began, and it has been sporadic for the past seven years too. I didn’t know what to expect, but I thought that surely, residences specifically for wheelchair users and people with disabilities ‘done’ with rehabilitation existed. As far as I’ve seen, at least here in Michigan, I was wrong. The ones I know of are for people with severe mental disabilities who need help with the bureaucracy of daily living, for  people when they first leave the hospital after their accident (as temporary places to stay), or for elderly people.  (I, 47, was even turned down by one or two assisted living places because I was too young; the call taker couldn’t understand why I would want to live in a community of senior citizens.) Anyway, I finally did get into a senior living place for four months.

The main problem I have run into with  one assisted living residence and personal care agencies is that the places are shaped around the needs of elderly people, and we wheelies are lumped in with seniors, even as our needs may be vastly different. Seniors typically don’t have to worry as much about being attractive for a growing social life or a job interview, for examples. Their social lives are likely all set, and probably they are retired by then. Seniors may have a wealth of experiences behind them and much wisdom to spread, but it’s still different or even opposite. Accordingly, staffs are unequipped to deal with diversity or are too small to be able to provide the time to be patient with residents’ partial abilities. Personal care operates like an assembly line where routine and haste are the laws of the land and excess needs are unwelcome. My experience has indicated that caregivers are not specifically educated on how to deal with a community of people baring a broad range of abilities and inabilities, or even that each disability is unique, as the individual who has it is unique.

Please see my post Comparing Apples to Oranges in the ‘Communication Detours’ category.