International Women’s Day coverage.
Editor’s Note:
March 8 is International Women's Day. In the week leading up to it, SaltWire Network is sharing stories, all written by women, focusing on this year's theme: “A challenged world is an alert world, and from challenge comes change.” Each day, we will tackle a different subject area as we celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness, and encourage our readers to take action towards equality.
nicole.sullivan @cbpost.com
@CBPostNSullivan
SYDNEY — Casey Perrin spent her 19th birthday in a coma.
The Oxford, Cumberland County native doesn't remember much from the months leading up to her birthday because of the allterrain vehicle accident where she suffered life-changing injuries.
It was June 5, 2011. Perrin was the passenger on an ATV that collided with a second ATV travelling ahead of them. Perrin was thrown from the vehicle and the result was a traumatic brain injury and paraplegia.
While in hospital, Perrin developed a meningitis infection on her brain after a spinal fluid tap procedure. Doctors told her mother that Perrin had a 10 per cent chance of survival. One doctor said he'd never seen so much pus in a brain.
"When my mom told me that later, I was like, 'Oh my God.' Shoot you right in the heart," said Perrin, who is now 28 and uses a wheelchair.
The antibiotics worked, and Perrin's future is bright.
She was the valedictorian of her 2019 Mount St. Vincent University class and is a medal-winning athlete who's competed nationally and internationally, including at the 2017 Canada Summer Games, and served as a Rick Hansen Ambassador, helping educate people about being in a wheelchair.
Perris said her decision to move to Halifax in 2013 to attend university was the best she's made, but it's not only because of her growing list of accomplishments.
"I moved to Halifax to restart my life," she said, explaining in the city she's not subjected to as many stares or people feigning niceness.
Doctors warned her and her family she might lose friends after the accident. She didn't think that would happen, but it did.
"People who were my friends treated me a lot differently. I couldn't understand that. I'm the same girl. I'm just sitting down ... There is a lot of fake nice and a lot of stares," she said.
"It's like two different worlds. An abled-bodied world, where everybody is treated with respect. And then like, if a disabled person comes up to you, you have to stare at them and not respect them. It's a horrible situation, to be honest with you."
NON-PERSON
Marie Ryan, former deputy mayor of St. John's, N.L., also experienced changes in attitudes when she needed to use a wheelchair for mobility.
"I felt I became a nonperson. So my views and perspectives were not considered outside of my family and friends, like if I was dealing with service providers," said Ryan, who is a consultant and partner of Goss Gilroy Inc.
"People wouldn't look at you. They'd look at the person who was pushing the chair. They wouldn't talk to you. They'd talk to the person behind me. I lost my ability to walk, and somehow, it felt like I had lost my intelligence — or that was the perception of others anyway."
An advocate for disability rights and accessible housing, Ryan was a teacher when she got sick in the mid-1980s and went to the Mayo Clinic in the United States for a diagnosis.
In 1989, Ryan spent four months in intensive care, and for four-and-a-half years, her health was so bad she remembers very little from that time.
Thankful for the support she had from family and friends, she still struggled with accessible housing and poverty. Thirty years later, Ryan thinks there's now more understanding about disability but the challenges she faced haven't changed.
"There are people who don't have those support systems. They are the ones that will fall through the cracks, experience the most difficult periods of their lives," said Ryan.
"If I got sick again today, God forbid, the same circumstances, I can't say that much would have changed for me, except I have 30 years working behind me and money built up."
PANDEMIC CHALLENGES
Like many Atlantic Canadians, Perrin lost her job when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like many people with disabilities, the 28-year-old is at high risk of serious complications resulting from her injuries and has been isolating at home for almost a year.
"I used to have a normal life before COVID happened. I'd go to the gym, go to work," she said.
"I feel like my mental health (has been affected) because I literally can't go anywhere. I can't go out to a restaurant."
This isolation is being felt by disabled people across the country and advocate Jewelles Smith said not enough is being done by the government to address this or provide other supports.
"We felt, the whole community just felt completely ignored and invisible. Especially those of us who live in the community. We don't live in institutions. If you live in institutions, some awful things happened, but at least the government was paying attention," said Smith, who works with the Canadian Council for Disabled People.
"We really felt ignored. Many of the responses were not having a disability lens applied to them. It's been very difficult for people with disabilities across the country."
Through her work, Smith heard from many disabled women who were struggling to work from home, teach their children and deal with no help from support workers because they couldn't come into their homes.
"It just is layer upon layer of difficulty," said Smith. "I try to think of what it would have been like to have raised my sons during this time when you can't go anywhere, you can't have your support workers in (because they aren't vaccinated), there's no personal care, no respite. I couldn't imagine how much stress disabled mothers are under right now."
INCLUSIVE FUTURE
Many of the challenges with things like food, transportation and supports aren't necessarily pandemic-specific.
"A pandemic is the perfect scene and setting to demonstrate what some people with disability experience every day of every month of every year," Ryan said.
Both Ryan and Smith say the path to an inclusive accessible society must include looking at the intersectionality of disability and not at disability as a homogenous whole.
"The needs of a blind woman are very different than the needs of a disabled woman," said Smith. "You can't just put up a ramp."
Intersectionality also includes where someone lives. For disabled people living in rural areas, there are often fewer services available than in urban centres.
Smith said if Canada is to become truly inclusive, there must be a review of all policies for disabled people with a disabled lens, to make sure they are meeting the needs of the people they're intended to help.
Perrin believes if more people were educated about disabilities, there would be more understanding and more acceptance. This is why she's starting her teaching degree in September and speaks publicly about her story.
"Maybe if students see me in my wheelchair, they'll ask questions and they'll learn," she said. "Maybe if they're taught about disability at school, I wouldn't be asked a million questions when I go out on a date."