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The Room of Pain and Loneliness
Edward L. Hooper
EDWARD L. HOOPER is married to his wife, Cindy,
and has two children, Stacey and Shari.
He writes, volunteers, plays quad rugby
and is dedicated to disability rights and the disability movement.
"As those great ADAPT protesters said,
'I want to go where everyone has gone before.'"ABRIDGED FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw
"I have a picture of that room. It’s in my head even now. There’s a toilet. There’s an elevated bathtub – the kind that lets them slide you in from a hospital bed. There’s two other bathtubs in there, too – regular ones.
"Two frosted windows there, there in grab, green
walls. A big, heavy door. A lot of chrome in there. And a cold floor. A cold, cold brown
tile floor."
At the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children in Leetsville, PA, and particularly in the
keen
memory of Tom Zabelsky, it served a very different purpose. It was a closet. A sterile
closet.
"The room – the whole institution – had no warmth. It was sterile. Sterile and cold." It was in this room that Tom remembers being confined. For hours. For days. Alone.
The very night Tom arrived at D.T. Watson, as he remembers it today, he fell out of bed and broke his hip. He doesn’t know how he fell, he says; he didn’t have the strength or ability at the time to move his body, he remembers that.
And though X-rays were taken which confirmed a break, neither he nor his parents were told about the injury for months – and then, according to his mother, they found out quite by accident, when a nurse let it "slip out" one day.
He was little, he was hurt. And he cried.
"If you don’t stop crying we’re going to put you in The Room! By yourself!" Tom recalls the words today – years later. They punctuated, he says, the abusive actions and attitude he felt all his days at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children.