Amputee Story Time: Weird things People Have Said to Me

 So, I lost both my legs when I was a baby, which means I’ve had a lifetime of experience dealing with able-bodied people saying…really strange things about my disability. From weird questions to someone claiming my disability is a government conspiracy theory, this is some of the weirdest things people have said to me as an amputee.

And while I share these stories, please enjoy this drawing of my OC Nix who is in desperate need of a nap. This felt like a fitting picture given some of the stuff coming up in this video.

Was that your Grandma you were with last night?

So this first story was something someone said to my partner about me, but years and years ago, before I came out as trans, my partner used to work at the local pub in the small town we lived in. He'd been working there for a few months when he told one of his co-workers, let's call him Ben, that he was planning to book a table at the restaurant attached to the pub on his day off for our anniversary, since there weren't a lot of other places in town to go and eat.

As it happened, Ben was working the day we booked for. After we got settled, and my partner had gone over to order, Ben brought our food out to us, which was a little odd. Usually you have to go and get the food yourself at these kinds of pubs, but I just assumed Ben wanted an excuse to chat so he could take a break or something. He ended up chatting with both me and my partner for a good 5-10 minutes before his manager caught onto what he was doing and told him to get back to work. It's worth noting I'd met Ben before, several times, albeit briefly, as my family were regulars there, so neither me nor my partner thought to mention my name or that I was the partner he'd been talking about the other night.

This is relevant because during my partner's next shift, Ben asked my partner why he didn't go on that date he'd been talking about. My partner, understandably confused and asked him what he was talking about, He'd had spoken to us, he got in trouble over it and everything. Ben stared at my partner for a bit with this confused expression and just said "That was your girlfriend? I thought she was your grandma."

Keep in mind, this is what I looked like that night:

[ID: An image of Cy pre-transition and their partner. Cy is white with long brown hair, wearing a leather jacket and blue earings. Their partner has light brown skin and has very short, black hair. He is wearing a dark blue suit and a blue tie/ End ID]

 

I think I was maybe 19 at the time, and I'm 90% sure I still had braces. I got asked for my ID 3 times that night by the other employees. When my partner asked *why* he'd thought I was his grandmother and not the date he'd been talking about all shift, Ben simply said "Oh I just didn't know people our age could be wheelchairs..."

How did you go to uni for art without legs?

A few years ago, I used to work on a program that taught disability sports to kids, mainly wheelchair basketball and taught some general disability awareness while we were there. While I do have a few funny questions from the kids themselves, the best, and weirdest questions always, *ALWAYS*, came from the teachers and this story is no exception.

At the end of every one of these shows, we always ask a teacher and a small group of older students to help us pack the sports wheelchairs away into our van. I was dissembling the chairs for the kids when the teacher in charge came over to help and struck up a conversation with me. eventually he asked “do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

Any visibly disabled viewers know that what follows “Can I ask you a personal question” is always either the most mundane, generic, not-personal-at-all thing conceivable, or it’s something that makes it into a video like this. There is no in-between.

He asks me what I’m studying at university, since I'd mentioned it during my talk with the kids, to which I say animation and game art. He gets this confused look on his face, followed by a few moments of silence during which he pulls the closest thing I think I’ve ever seen to the “confused maths meme” face.

[ID: A white woman with blond hair looks at the camera with her eyes, looking very confused. Mathematical formulas flash by, overlaying the footage as it zooms into her face/ end ID]

 

Eventually he says, “So…how does that work?”

Most people are pretty unfamiliar with both animation and game development, so I assume that’s what he’s asking about. My education was mostly in 3D animation and 3D game art, so I start explaining the basics of that process and he interrupts me and says “no, no, I mean how do you go to uni for art stuff…without legs, how does that…work”

I asked him what he meant but before he could answer my co-worker called me over to help with something else, so I never figured out why he thought this would be an issue, but the question will forever be in my mind. The only thing I can think of is that maybe he'd seen something about mocap, which is where an actor is recorded using specialised cameras and equiptment and their movements are mapped onto an animated character, and just assumed that's how all animation is done? But even that isn't off-the-table for amputees. Alas, I never got the chance to find out.

Also, bonus shout out to the teacher at another school I went to on a solo job once who watched me drive the work van into the school, helped me find parking, watched me get out of the van alone and helped me unload the sports wheelchairs out of the now empty van before asking if someone else drove me here.

Honestly I have so many stories from that job, and while I promised never to laugh at the kids, I made no such promise about the teachers who insisted they knew better.

That’s a government conspiracy!

A while back, I had to take my pet snake Nugget to the vet, he was fine, but while my partner and I were lining up to pay at reception, I was approached by an older lady and her dog. I had actually struck the conversation with her, because her dog seemed like he really wanted to come and investigate my wheelchair, so I asked if I could pat him and let him check my chair out. While he sniffed around me, she and I started chatting when she eventually asked what had happened to my legs, which was a pretty common occurrence. I told her I lost them as a baby to meningococcal.

I’ve been told by folks overseas that outside of Australia and New Zealand, meningococcal isn’t really well known or talked about, but here in Australia it’s one of the diseases we vaccinate against, so most people are at least vaguely aware of what it is, mainly that it’s an illness the spreads like the common cold, gives flu-like symptoms in the early stages, causes a rash in the late stages, and if left untreated, can kill you in under 24 hours. Nasty stuff.

For a few years before Covid, there was a big push from the government to better educate the public on meningococcal, so it’s very common to see posters and pamphlets at your local doctors and hospital about meningococcal here, mainly reminding parents to get their kids meningococcal vaccines. After the rise of anti-vaxxers during covid however, there has been a massive influx of people who simply did not believe meningococcal was real. As I was about to discover...this lady was one of them.

“You know that’s a government conspiracy right? Meningococcal isn’t real.”

I looked at the woman for a moment before asking her why she thought that.

“Well think about it, you didn’t see it twenty years ago.”

“well I’m 27, and I got it when I was less than a year old, and considering what it did to my legs and entire lower body, I definitely heard about it over 20 years ago,” I joked.

I went on to try and explain that because of how fast meningococcal kills, it was really common until pretty recently that people would die before doctors could figure out what was wrong, so we didn’t start hearing about it much until people started surviving it, though there's a few reported cases from as far back as the 1600's. but this woman was convinced that not only had I been lied to, that my amputations probably weren’t even necessary, and they’d “mutilated me” just so my parents would help to spread the lie too.

Thankfully, the receptionist, who had been listening to the conversation and was just as baffled as I was by the whole thing, realised the lady was getting aggravated and let me cut the line so I could pay so I could get away from the conversation.

I Bet you feel a spiritual connection to snakes because of…you know…

So in year 10 in Australian schools, we do something called work experience, which is where you pick a career you’re interested in and work for a company in that industry for a week, kind of like an internship. Most kids pick a local business, a few of my friends went and worked in the local butcher’s and bakery, a few volunteered at local animal shelters or did a week of “apprenticeship” at the local mechanics. I, on the other hand, had other plans. I couldn’t do work experience in my chosen field, animation, because the studios couldn’t risk kids leaking stuff, so instead I applied to do work experience in my backup career’s industry: Zoo Keeping. My Cousin had done his work experience at Taronga Zoo's reptile house in Sydney a few years earlier so I thought I’d try applying too! Turns out, at least back then, they didn’t get a lot of applications for work experience in the reptile house specifically, so my application was accepted pretty much straight away!

My responsibilities for the week were to help the keepers prepare the food for the herbivores, go to the “mouse house” and pick up dinner for the carnivores and insectivores, help feed the non-venomous reptiles, give one particular chameleon some TLC while he was being quarantined, pick up Komodo dragon poo and most notably, assist with the public interaction shows.

These public interaction shows were a daily event that aimed to make reptiles, especially native reptiles, much less scary and hopefully lead to less people trying to hurt them if they encounter them in the wild. One of the keepers stands up on stage, and, if its not too busy, a volunteer or work experience student would take some of the non-venomous snakes and lizards around to let people see them up close and give them a pet if they wanted to. It was our responsibility to not just carry the animal around, but watch its body language for signs of discomfort or stress and put it away if it was getting to be a bit much.

That’s exactly what happened on this particular day, the python I was holding was starting to get agitated and I decided to put him away, apologising to the crowd and explaining that he was getting stressed. When I came back, and older man approached me and complimented me on how I handled the situation, saying it almost looked like I had some kind of spiritual connection with the snake. I laughed and said I’d been around reptiles since I was a kid and they're pretty easy to predict once you know what to look for.

He shakes his head and says “no, no, I think you actually have a gift. You have a spiritual connection, I can feel it! It’s probably because of… well… you know…” and points at my legs, “They can sense you’re alike. I can tell you’ve learned how to adapt to your situation by watching them.”

Me being the undiagnosed autistic child I was, took the statement a little too literately and all I could imagine was me learning to “adapt” to being legless by trying to do the worm everywhere instead of walking, because that’s how snakes move I guess. This mental image was so distracting to me that I just kind of…stared off into space, though it probably looked like I was giving him the stink eye because eventually he kind of just uncomfortably shuffled away. It might have also been my mother and the keeper making a B-line for us, but either way, I still count that as a win.

Conclusion

So yeah, I hope you enjoyed my little stories! I have a lot more of them I could tell, but I felt like these were the funniest...and the least likely to get me into trouble with YouTube haha. Let me know though if you want to hear more!

A lot of the content I'm planning to make for this channel is more focused on giving authors advice for writing disabled characters, but I wanted to share these stories, both because they're honestly just really funny, but also because I so rarely see media using these weird, day-to-day moments that come with being disabled, and I think that's a shame, because it has a lot of comedic potential. How would your character react to being told their disability isn't real and is just part of a government conspiracy? How would they react to someone assuming they're their date's grandmother? It's worth having a think about, because if your character's disability is visible, this is just a small sample of some of the weird stuff people might say, completely unprompted.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next time. Bye!