Steve “Ste” Walker looks like your average man.
However, he has Crohn’s disease, a condition that makes everyday tasks incredibly taxing. Unfortunately, because most people cannot tell from looking at Ste that he is coping with a disability, Ste often finds himself in frustrating situations. For example, the other day, Ste was at a hospital shop in Yorkshire, England when someone asked him why he was there despite looking perfectly healthy. When Ste went home that day, he wrote about his frustration in a Facebook post.
In his post, Ste lists the numerous procedures he has had to deal with because of Crohn’s disease:
- He has a Hickman line coming out of his chest and resting in his heart to feed him on TPN.
- He has a rhylls tube down his nose and into his stomach to help drain his stomach.
- He has a scar from 3 major life-saving surgeries that go from the center of his chest to the top of his pubic bone.
- He has an ileostomy, which is a section of small bowel that comes out of his abdomen and attaches to a stoma bag to collect feces.
The list goes on and on. In addition to the physical complications, Ste also fights a mental battle every day. He hasn’t been able to eat a meal in 2 years, and he has only been able to spend 4 weeks at home in the past 18 months. It’s no wonder why it’s so frustrating for Ste to hear strangers question why he uses the toilet for people with disabilities or parks in spaces reserved for people with disabilities. It’s all the more exasperating when people automatically assume that he is “conning” the system.
Ste’s post has helped raise awareness about invisible disabilities and is a good reminder that we often don’t know what people are facing below the surface.
This is a very good point to raise, and a great example. Invisible disabilities can be physical but hard to see (the case shown here), or mental/intellectual and completely invisible. In both cases, I think the key is to treat every person with respect, and have some faith that if someone is using a disability service, they are usually doing so for a very good reason.