Happy Wednesday Everyone!
So, I thought I would just quickly explain what my Wednesday posts are going to be all about.
I am notorious for leaving my white cane in the most random of places and it’s retrieval is nearly always both awkward and comical. For where’d I leave it Wednesday, which is what I’m going to be categorizing these posts as, I will be sharing some of the stories about the places I have left it and the scenarios that has put me in. I will also be sharing some other stories just about things I have experienced as a visually impaired girl trying to get about. Let me know if you enjoy these – or not.
And with that…. here’s the first story!
In my first year at University I had a lecture in one of the big lecture halls in the main building on campus, and when I say it was big I mean it can fit about two hundred people maybe even more. I’d already gotten lost on my way to meet my friend, there is nothing like the feeling you get when you’re going up to the fourth floor in a lift and you realize the building you’re meant to be in doesn’t even have a lift! I didn’t want anyone to know that I’d done this so I carried on to the fourth floor, got out, and walked around the floor for about ten minutes until I knew the coast was clear and then I went back to the lift and made my way to the right building.
So then the lecture – I won’t go on about what I was learning in the lecture because, unless you have an interest in memoir writing techniques and lecturers who put books on the reading list because they fancy them, you would be bored reading about it. I should probably mention that I have to sit at the front of the lecture hall – in Secondary School this was always called the spit zone – and I’d already had to use my cane to climb down the steps to reach my seat but during class I keep it folded up under my seat so that I remember where it is.
Well that’s the intention anyway…. picture the scene:
Class finishes, and I get up putting my yellow coat, wooly hat and gloves on and follow my friend to the steps. This time I’m having to use both hands on the handrail to my right to pull myself up each step. They’re those awkward sizes, where it’s too long to only take one step but too short to take two steps – how do you know whether you’re tripping over the steps or because of the steps? – Anyway, I was walking up the steps sideways like a crab and I finally made it to the top and I’m saying to my friend as we leave the lecture hall that it was difficult to get up the stairs today and she said to me “probably because you’re dressed for winter but you’re indoors” – and yes, she had a point but when the class waiting outside had gone into the lecture hall and the door had shut. That’s when I realized I had left my cane in there under my seat.
Now I had two choices – wait outside until the class ended in who knows how many hours or gather up my courage and go back inside the lecture hall and get it. Against my better judgement I chose the second option. The whole time I was back in there I could feel their eyes watching me, you know they say you can feel their eyes burning holes in your back, well it was like that. I wonder if it would have been a better or worse feeling had I been able to actually see their eyes and not just the shaped coloured blobs of people. I got my cane from under the chair, asking the girl sat there to move her legs for me to get it, politely of course. Then I opened it, forgetting that it flicks open to four times the size like a weapon out of a fantasy novel. You can believe I rushed out of that room with my makeshift weapon before I was stared at for almost taking someone’s head off accidentally.
That is the end of the first where’d I leave it Wednesday story! Let me know if you liked it or if you didn’t and next Wednesday I will upload another story.
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