Excursions

Time is running short. I’m shoving with all my might, but I’ve only got about 120 seconds until the opportunity is gone. This wheelchair. Just. Won’t. Move! And the blasted pole in the middle of the cart is not helping matters. Who designed this thing? I must be down to 30 seconds. I give things another twist and shove. And then a good smack. And whew, it’s somehow in there, and the assistant (who has done up to this point anything but assist) shuts the door. The cart takes off, and the next one arrives.

How on earth did I get here? I am in Madrid, Spain. It’s around 5 o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday. I’ve got two clients with me, and we’re trying to board the Teleférico, a cable car that plucks you out of the city and places you in the southeast corner of Casa de Campo, a massive greenspace west of the city that many locals head to for picnics, bike rides, or a simple cable car ride. It’s a peaceful get-away one can reach from the city’s metro and bus routes.

I should clarify – it is a peaceful get-away if you’re not a group of seven, composing of two speech therapists, one woman who walks, one man who wheels, one man who walks supported with a cane, one man who walks supported by another’s shoulder, and me. Four of us (or five, if you go with one client’s joke that “Madeleine’s aphasia is worse than mine,”) have challenges with communication.

An important thought: As I puzzled and pondered over that last sentence, a significant part of me felt uncomfortable. On intuition, I’ve always hesitated to claim I “understand” what another person is going through. This is a principle that was reinforced throughout OT school – that empathy is a far more powerful tool for support than assuming we understand something that we likely never will. As young therapists trying to relate to clients, many of us fell into this trap. The result was cringe-worthy, but an important lesson.

On the other hand, I think (granted this is coming from me, wherein the only disadvantaged, marginalized, or minority group that applies to my life is being a woman, and, given my privileged environments this has yet to be a disadvantage thus far) that in certain situations, we sometimes fall into the trap of over-empathizing. We’re exceedingly cautious, afraid to offend, and sometimes even pitying. I would argue our current world of “Cancel Culture” has done nothing but fuel this fussy fire.

Now, we don’t have time to unpack all that, perhaps I will in a future reflection. However, I would like to say this. Before I deleted that sentence preceding this ramble, I paused. This was a client who made a remark about me, and he was not the only one to do so! This was a playful jab between close friends or even family, just like the ones my dad and my old track coach make all the time. The kind where the recipient shouldn’t feel embarrassed, but rather know they are accepted, or in the case of my dad, loved. This was not me claiming to understand what these individuals go through on a daily basis. This was me fitting into the gran familia Maria described. Though at first it made me uncomfortable, I knew it was the right thing to write.

And now, back to the point.

I’m on an excursion with Logopedia del Entorno, an aptly named group that brings speech therapy sessions out into the environment. In other words, outside of the mutual awareness that exists within Polibea. The purpose of these excursions is to practice what has been covered in a controlled therapy session out into daily life. That is, in addition to the genuine purpose of having something fun to plan together and look forward to.

So how does this lead me to my current predicament, shoving a wheelchair into a moving cable car? The two speech therapists have already boarded carts with two of the clients and were long gone. That leaves me with the other two clients and one wheelchair, trying to hop on.

I couldn’t help but chuckle and think back to those lessons in OT school on how to fold up and take apart different wheelchairs. I doubt this was the exact scenario any of my classmates nor I had in mind. And let me tell you, it’s a lot harder to do under time pressure.

Once the chair is set and off, on its own soaring above the Casa de Campo, it’s now time for us three to get on board. This goes much more smoothly. As we’re drifting over the landscape, I feel nervous. I don’t know what to say to the two people sitting across from me. I’ll be working with one of them for the case studies, but I don’t know where to begin. I’ve sat with her through speech therapy and occupational therapy, and I’ve seen how therapists who’ve known her for years are able to pick up on the nuanced meanings of the same few words or phrases she produces. I’ve witnessed how, with cue cards and reading lips, she can speak more words. But how am I to spend a day with her, when I don’t know what to say in a 10-minute cable car ride?

These are concerns that I pocket for a later date. For now, I’ll focus on being here, present in this moment, with the two people in front of me. The other, for whom this is clearly not his first cable car ride, points out all the things I must see. Though he struggles to tell me what he wants to share, the excited gesturing and “¡Mira, mira!” get the point across.

The arrive on the other end of the trajectory is no different than our departure. Chaotic. While the man with me (of the “¡Mira, mira!”s) was alright to place his cane on the cart, then use the doorframe to pull himself up while I steadied him at his waist, he was scared to step off. Understandably – the cart was swinging, and the time was ticking. As he continued to hesitate, the cart moved again. The other two therapists and I moved with him, scared that he would fall. With the additional 120 seconds at the next pause, he was able to step off. Whew. As we walked away, I saw the giant red button that pauses the Teleférico. Why did none of the employees offer to use this? All we needed was a bit of extra time.

Upon our arrival, we flipped the common saying, and made it all about the destination, not the journey. We put the recent mayhem behind us and enjoyed our picnic. The speech therapists had packed potato chips, empanadas, and a Tortilla Española. We had drinks, and good company.

We played a wide variety of games, some easier for me to follow than others. The most challenging by far revolved around songs. A few of the clients, one in particular, are always humming. Perhaps they can’t express what they want to say in words, so they opt to do so through hums. Regardless, this game required all of us to hum. More specifically, it required us to hum well-known tunes from Madrid and Spain. This is where I epically failed.

Nonetheless, it was fun. It was beautiful to see each person’s face light up when they recognized the tune and started to hum along. Or perhaps, as our cacophony of sounds leads me to believe, they didn’t always recognize it but pretended to anyway.

We also talked about our past work – one was a truck driver (and more importantly, he tells us, a Scooba diver on the side), one a social worker, one worked in the shipping industry. Comprehension between us was often hard, but with the therapists’ prior knowledge of the clients’ histories, as well as having family members’ contact info on WhatsApp to confirm, we were able to clarify. We also talked about the importance of gestures and expressions when words don’t come as easily. One therapist started naming emotions, and we all had to show how we would portray that with our facial features alone. Some of the reactions were absolutely priceless.

In the end, we decided to not go back the same way we came. Along with the two speech therapists, three of the clients chose to go back to Polibea via taxi. From there, they would be picked up just as they would any other day. No timed, wobbly cable cars involved.

The fourth client, the one who I’m working with for the case studies, hadn’t come with the rest of the group from Polibea in the first place. She doesn’t spend the whole morning there, as they do. She came from her own home in central Madrid and arrived by bus. She decided to take the Teleférico back to our original point and hop on the bus just as she had arrived. Never mind the fact that we were going in the same direction, I was curious. I wanted to see how she operates on her own. So, I offered to ride back with her on the cable car, and then continue onto her bus journey as we both headed northeast. She didn’t seem to mind, so that is exactly what we did.

And there’s more to come on that when I begin writing her story.

Coming Soon