Thirty-three-year-old Sam Cleasby has a colostomy bag because she has no bowel.
The bag requires emptying often and also requires sometimes panicked trips to the bathroom. So when she endured a public shaming for using disabled facilities she not only had a right to use but also desperately needed, she was understandably perturbed.
Cleasby wrote a thought-provoking open letter on her blog So Bad Ass: ‘To the woman who tutted at me using the disabled toilets’.
The letter has quickly gone viral due to it’s simple but important message- you don’t need to look disabled, to be disabled.
Sam writes…
“I know you saw me running in, with my able bodied legs and all. You saw me opening the door with my two working arms. You saw me without a wheelchair. Without any visible sign of disability.
Take a moment. Remember that not all people who have the right to use disabled toilets are in a wheelchair. Some of us have a jpouch, a lot of us have an Ostomy bag that needs emptying and changing with the use of space, a sink and a bin. And even more of us just don’t want to shit our pants in public.”
The letter has already had over a million views and is credited for opening up a very necessary conversation around our discomfort with disability and the subsequent failure to see it in its every form.
“My lack of wheelchair may have suggested to you that I was some lazy cow who didn’t care. Some inconsiderate bitch who was using something I wasn’t entitled too. (I actually carry a card to explain that I’m entitled to and have a disability key if you’d have cared to ask). You may have seen my face blushing as I caught your eye and assumed I was showing guilt at blagging the disabled loos.
The fact is that I have no bowel. I have a pouch formed from my small intestine which can’t handle volume and so I have to go to the toilet and poo several times a day. My lack of large intestine means that my stool is totally liquid as I have no means of absorbing the fluids in food and so its really hard to hold it when I need to go…”
Sam has also started the hashtag #StopPooBeingTaboo trending, a statement to coincide with this awareness of invisible disability, as the public embarrassment extends to her actual bowel movements.
“… before you ran outside the loos and called to your friend “OH MY GOD! You should hear the noise in there!!! I wouldn’t go in if I was you!!!!” Perhaps you could have noted my daughter who was waiting outside with our trolley because her mum had had to leave her stranded to run to the toilet. Perhaps you could have stopped and heard me sobbing with pain because the acid in my stools has no way to be neutralised because I don’t have a large intestine and so opening my bowels actually burns my skin.”
The letter has received plenty of public support and congratulations.
Disability affects people in a variety of ways. The lack of a wheelchair does not indicate a lack of disability…. http://t.co/6XeSAAlVf9
It’s really is a simple reminder to us all, disability isn’t always visual. Sometimes someone who looks young and perfectly able has chronic pain and needs that seat on the bus. Sometimes someone has Irritable Bowel Disease and needs to run to the disabled toilets. Sometimes someone is post surgery and needs to use that disabled car park. Disability isn’t discriminate and it isn’t always visible.
Let’s talk openly about disability and #stoppoobeingtaboo.
