Cane and Dis-Abel-ed

Aaron Singh -- In the madness of life at Cambridge, you have to take time out. That is, if you want to avoid becoming one of those nerds so ubiquitous here, who walk out of lectures at 2pm, into the library, and out again at 7am the next day to go to lectures, and who survive on nothing but bread and Sainsbury’s sandwich filler, and who raise their noses from their books only to clean their thick-as-Biochemistry-textbooks glasses once in a while. That, or a lecturer. (Seriously, some of them look like they’ve been buried in their labs so long they haven’t seen the light of day for months. At least, that’s what their dress senses tell me. Ever been lectured by a rambling old man in an Edwardian suit?)

So we all find ways to cope. Mine is comedy acting. I take to the Cambridge stage at least once per term, to the laughter and applause of drunk students too inebriated to throw rotten tomatoes at my lame jokes, and to the consternation of my tutors, who tell me I should stop prancing around on stage and concentrate on becoming a doctor. And so it was that last Saturday I was on stage as Romeo, and during the final dance when I had to lift Juliet onto my shoulder, something in my leg pulled. And when I woke up the next morning, my leg was NOT happy.

So this past week I’ve been hobbling around on a cane. It’s a borrowed cane, belonging to another medic who, for whatever reason, thought it would be convenient to jump off the Bridge of Sighs onto a punt floating past underneath (true story). It’s a nice cane, too, that bears no small resemblance to the cane made famous by Hugh Laurie’s Dr House in the TV series.

We’ve all seen patients on canes. But they usually hobble into the clinic or teaching area, get checked out, then go back to their lives, and that’s that. We never stop to think about how their lives must be.

But now I had my chance.

The first thing I learned about walking with a cane is that your walking speed is considerably reduced. Here in Cambridge everyone walks fast, and the first few days I was late for lectures, tutorials, everything. But eventually I got the hang of it. I started twirling my cane whenever I stood still, and used it to do all sorts of tricks like open doors, press buttons, and hook objects to drag closer (Warning: Do not try this with a full glass).

But the thing I wondered about was: would people give me more space? Are we as a society still sympathetic to disabled people, or have we decided that they don’t deserve sympathy simply for being disabled? To ascertain this, I decided to try the most daring experiment, the ultimate gauge of public civility, that most time-honoured test of sympathy: The sidewalk test.

*dum dum DUMMMM*

It’s simple. You hobble along a sidewalk (and here, the sidewalks can be incredibly narrow) and see if people give way or if they simply stare ahead and continue to walk, in which case you can either squeeze past, give way yourself and step off the sidewalk (which I do for ladies anyway, this being Britain) or, if you’re in a particularly nasty Dr House-ish mood, beat them out of your way with your cane.

And the verdict?

Idealists rejoice, for most people are still nice. On the really narrow sidewalks everyone stepped off for me when they saw my cane. I didn’t get treated any differently either, and some of my friends were very nice and helped carry my stuff (there are always some perks). And whenever I bumped into an elderly person using a cane, they’d smile kindly at me, or give me a knowing twinkle (as if to say “get off that cane whilst you still can, youngster”).

Thankfully now I’m almost off my cane, but still … I’ll never look at a person with a cane the same way again.