Getting my first walking stick

A few thoughts on 3 months with a walking stick and fighting internalised abelism.

Gent, Belgium.

Getting my first walking stick

During October/November time I was very busy with work. It was good to be busy but my body did not have time to recover—whether due to ME/CFS or possibly triggered by my ADHD medication. Every day activities like doing the washing up became tough. Walking up the hill to the bus stop left me exhausted. One day, a memory popped up in my brain and reminded me about hikers who use walking sticks/poles to help on hikes. My wife actually used them when we descended Yr Wyddfa (Mount Snowdon). Not everyone uses a stick/cane because of an injury. Some, like my wife, use them simply for support and stability. Could I?

After a bit of searching around I found a local ability store and headed over. I was hoping to get a foldable one that would fold away into my camera bag while on jobs. The shop assistant helped find a stick that would work for me, pointing out how high I should set it and thinking about weight limits. My needs were for when I was out working as a photographer, so my weight + bag weight = weight limit of stick. The nice metallic blue one I saw online sadly did not suit my needs. The only one in the store that did was about 2cm under my height requirement, but the assistant felt it would still work for me. I tried it out, felt OK and bought a foldable Hurrycane Comfort. It is light blue with a wide base for stability and stands by itself so I can let go, grab my camera and not have to worry about the stick falling over. (FYI, it often falls over.)

Leaving the store with my new mobility tool felt... odd. My only real connections to such devices were from seeing old people, like my dad, use them. My brain broke into pieces trying to make sense of it. "Why am I using an old persons cane? I'm not old." "It's a support stick because I need support." Walking back to the car I felt like I had aged 40 years. I was fighting internalised ableism, and not winning. Every step reminded me of Fraiser's dad, Martin Crane. A man in his 60s wandering around his son's apartment all day with his walking stick and faithful dog. Why did my brain not make me feel like House from House? A man in his 40s with fantastic sarcasm skills. That's clearly me, so why did my brain make me feel like I was a 60 year old frail man?

Ableism! My brain gravitated towards the negative connotations of being disabled instead of the positive. Most likely because it is rare to see people happily living their most authentic upbeat disabled life in the media. Off the top of my head, people I can think of with a cane are;

Charlie Chaplin
Michael Sheen from Tron: Legacy doing Charlie Chaplin
Aforementioned Martin Crane and Dr House
A quick google gives me;
Gandalf (Old person)
Willy Wonka (Old in my head)
The first Doctor, from Doctor Who... really? (Also old)

It's basically a list of old men. As the saying goes, "You cannot be what you cannot see." So how can I feel like a young-at-heart person who simply needs a little help if the world around me equates cane with old and frail?

Maybe I was old and frail? After a few weeks with the stick I found myself at an exhibition launch where I was incredibly glad I had my cane. I barely had the energy to walk around the 3 room exhibition and spent most of the launch on a bench outside the venue trying to catch my breath. I was just about able to walk from that bench to the Uber with the aid of the stick. Exhaustion hit hard that day and I was glad I had support.

That's been the basic story for the past 3 months that I've been using my walking stick — though my health has improved significantly in recent weeks. Do I need it every day? No, but sometimes I need it when I've got somewhere so it's better to take it with me than hope I'll be OK. The folding feature has been useful, but the super wide base does not fit well with my camera bag. If I were to buy another cane, I would get one specifically for commuting to photography commissions that had a narrow base.

Which raises the question, would I buy another cane? A lot has changed since I first walked out of that ability store. Since coming off my ADHD medication I have done HIT workouts and ran over 10km without feeling exhausted. My need for a mobility aid might be over, but I am still using it. My chronic fatigue period has left me, no pun intended, feeling a little wobbly. It's scary knowing that my health can degrade so much in so little time to the point where I can't walk or talk. While I'm at the age when my mum developed ME/CFS, I still feel young. I don't want to feel how I felt after I left the store with my cane. Old. Frail. A burden. Thankfully, the journey I took with the cane helped me move away from that mental image and made me feel OK about having a cane.

I actually quite like my stick. It's currently wrapped up in LED lights. It started as a decoration for Christmas but has continued as it simply looks ace. I've had many people compliment my light up cane as I'm out for a walk. Admittedly, that's so nice. People aren't pitying me for being broken, they're actively telling me they wish they were as cool as I am. Me? Cool with a cane? OK, I'll take that.

Outside of the ableism it has been a challenge getting used to the walking stick. The main issue being that I would have it in my right hand, which is my camera hand. I can easily switch hands with the cane, but my left leg has been in need of support more than my right. So, camera or mobility? I chose mobility and had to accept that my camera would not always be ready for whatever I saw. It's tough because for most of the time I've had a camera it's always in my hand, ready just in case I see a photo to take. That said, I've coped by having the cane in my left hand and camera in right hand. My issue is general support, not a specific leg issue... though the left gets twitchy sometimes.

I'm glad that I made the choice to get a walking stick. It's helped me get around when needed, question myself and feel more confident about mobility aids. They are simply something to support you when you need it and we really do need to look past the stereotypes. I had a classic Baader–Meinhof moment after I got my walking stick and started to see so many more people using them, and young people too. Perhaps all of my concerns were weird ideas stuck in my head and that the younger generation has already passed on to a better world? It would be nice right?

So will I be keeping my cane? Yes. It'll be there for days when for whatever reason I feel like I need it.

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