To the editor:
I did not think I would be forced to write a second letter on the availability of pool therapy. The situation is discouraging as I write this during early fall.
Now we are not dealing with the governor or the Minnesota Department of Health. We are dealing with individual pools. I have been struggling to get the Wasie Pool open at Abbott Northwestern Hospital.
The two pools at Phillips Community Center remain closed. (Minneapolis pools are closed due to COVID-19.)
I have had three surgeries on my left leg and can have bad spasm without the chance to swim/exercise/relax the muscles. Are we going to be forced back to using opioids?
J. Rindels Hayden, Minneapolis
Society’s broken moral compass
This is a chain of events that the disability community of Minnesota, and frankly, disability communities everywhere else, is all too familiar with.
When PCAs can’t afford to pay their bills on low wages, they need leave their jobs, leave their clients. Then clients lose, lose the home they want to live in and go into a facility.
Then clients lose personal space, lose peace of mind, because they don’t know which staff is going to help them. They lose time, because they don’t know when staff are actually coming to help them. They wait. They forfeit control in an attempt to have the care they need, but too often staff don’t have time to address clients by name, let alone, properly train.
Mistakes are made. Ultimately, clients lose the care anyway. Clients are reduced into being submissive entities, to watched and washed, but only if, and when staff can manage.
They are lost, I know, because I am a former PCA client who now lives in a facility because all my PCAs quit. I have no control over how I live, or any power to my name. My name doesn’t matter, because I am just one of many people with disabilities in the state who is forced to live at the mercy of society’s broken moral compass, just waiting to be found.
Editor’s note: The writer’s name was withheld on request.
