I just returned from a meeting in Washington, D.C., convened by the Reeve Foundation to clarify how best to spend $25 million, the amount Congress authorized (not yet appropriated) for quality of life for 6 million people with paralysis as part of the recently passed Paralysis Act. Mostly we discussed health promotion. So … if we divided the pot among everyone with SCI, ALS, spina bifida, stroke, TBI, MS, PPS and other central nervous system conditions, we would each get $4.17.

Gosh. Gee. Golly. That covers one catheter. Maybe we should think of health promotion as something other than quality of life. What if we reclassified it as a defense spending item? We’re defending our lives by staying healthy, aren’t we? Then maybe Congress would authorize hundreds of billions for things other than outdated fighter-bombers.

Then we could reclassify quality of life as having to do with less important everyday things, like what happened to me when the meeting ended and I began my trip back to Oregon.

First, I left my minimally accessible hotel room, scraping my wheels on the bathroom doorway. The tiny shower seat sat unused in the tub-shower beneath the inaccessible shower head and controls.  Downstairs, accessible taxis were a rare species. I decided to roll toward the Metro train station, wherever that was, but industrial-strength rain began pummeling the sidewalk. I waited under the outside canopy.

Just then Paul Tobin, executive director of United Spinal Association, jetted out into the rain in his power chair, protected by an oversized rain poncho, bent forward like Paul Revere on his wild ride, hand on hat, the other on his joystick, cutting a wake down the flooded sidewalk with rain pounding down and poncho flapping in the wind. The man was prepared for anything that might threaten his quality of life.

Then it was my turn. My lap was weighed down with a large carry-on crammed with three days’ worth of everything I could possibly need, except, of course, a rain poncho. On top of that sat a thin cushion I use on flights, and my laptop. No hat, no electric motor, no joystick. I chugged out into the rain, my sore left shoulder hurting. Within seconds my glasses were smeared and fogged. I could have added “legally blind” to my ADA identity at that moment.

At the inaccessible Metro station, all the dry people waited inside, watching me through a large window as I slogged along in the rain, headed for the  elevator for wheelchair users across the street, moving like a drowned rat on wheels.

At the airport I endured the extended security shakedown the TSA reserves for wheelchair users. In the restroom, when the AB dude finally left the accessible stall, I changed clothes, right down to my sopping underwear.

Lightning delayed my flight four hours, I missed my connection in Phoenix, slept three hours in an El Cheapo Inn, had to arm-wrestle the shuttle driver to take me to the airport and somehow lost my driver’s license in the process.

Oh well. At least I still have my quality of life.