“I get away with murder,” Sue Haas confides. Bouncers fear her and seldom ask for her identification when she goes to the bars. She even sat on the sidelines at the Homecoming football game sipping beer.

She says her wheelchair keeps some people at bay, and sometimes this is to her advantage.

Haas, a senior human and family resources major, is originally from Rockford. She was born with muscular dystrophy, which started to affect her during her childhood. By age 11, she was in a wheelchair.

“Something happened and I couldn’t walk. I don’t know why. I went from being able to get up to not being able to get up. About six months later I lost the use of my hands. It all happened at once,” she said.

She had to relearn everything from how to eat to how to turn pages in a book.

Although Haas said she is not especially religious, she believes that there is a purpose behind her disability. “I probably would never have gone to college if I was walking. That’s just not our family way,” she said.

But she did go to NIU, despite some initial opposition because of its lack of accessiblity. “I was told when I came here, that I couldn’t go here. My high school guidance counselor told me that there was no way I could come to NIU and that I had to go to University of Illinois,” Haas said.

A lot of planning goes into scheduling Haas’ life including her classes, (“You learn the back ways,”) and scheduling people to help her get ready in the morning.

McMurray and Adams Halls (past the first floor) are totally inaccesible to her—luckily she doesn’t have any classes in either. She can’t get to the language lab in Watson or most of the residence halls, either.

Ironically, Haas once gave a lecture at Stevenson Towers on disability issues and had to have a table laid over the steps in order to get inside—there was no ramp to drive her chair into the building.

However, on a whole, NIU provides sufficient access for people in wheelchairs, Haas said. “But I think they don’t open up any options. They say, ‘This is the way you go. You have one door, you can go in this one door, but don’t think about going in any others, because we are not going to make them all acessible for you,'” she said.

For example, of the four entrances to the Holmes Student Center, she can only enter through one.

Getting from one place to another can be a major trek for Haas. “It took me two years to figure out how to get to the Huskie Den. You have to take the elevator in the student center up to the main floor, then go to the janitor’s room and take the freight elevator down to the basement and it lets you off right at the Huskie Den.”

Raas is a member of NIU’s Presidential Commission for Persons with Disabilities. This committee makes recommendations on what NIU has to do to be in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the first law to give disabled people civil rights.

Most people are not rude to her but sometimes they stare, although she isn’t aware of it much anymore. “If someone is out and out staring at me, I do notice it, and will sometimes stare back at him so he feels so uncomfortable that he’ll never do it again. I don’t care if people look. It’s normal to look.”

Other people seem afraid of her, she said. “Maybe they think I’m bitter, but I don’t really know what they think. Maybe they are afraid of a wheelchair. I don’t know why.”

She notices that people are quick to get out of her way when she drives up behind them in her chair. “People stand aside like I’m going to run them over. They hear me coming and scatter,” Haas said.

The rudest thing anyone said to Haas was when she was coming through a doorway in DuSable and a male student looked down at her and said, “‘Oh look, another invalid.'” A moment later, after what he said registered in her mind, Haas said she wanted to go after him. However, she was already late for her class and he was spared her wrath.

She has to rely on other people, usually strangers, to pull doors open for her and it doesn’t bother her, Haas said. “But it’s insecure. Especially relying on people who come in and help you do everything. What if they don’t show up? Then what do you do?”

That is what happened one winter during a snow storm. Her assistants lived off-campus and could not reach her dorm. “I couldn’t get up. I had to get a friend of mine to help me,” Haas said.

“I get down, sometimes. I can be a bitch. Things do get to you after a while. I get sick of everybody who’s taking care of me – ‘Get out of my face, I don’t want to look at you’ – but I have no choice.”

One time when she felt down was last winter. Everyone else on her floor went outside on a snowy night to play in the snow and she couldn’t. “I sat looking out my window, thinking, ‘I want to go play in the snow, I really want to play.'”

Most of her friends are not disabled and Haas said she prefers it that way. “I have another life too. I don’t want to hang around with people in wheelchairs all my life. That’s not me. I think of myself as normal and hang out with non-disabled people,” she said.

Still, the differences are there. Death has touched Haas more than it has her peers. “When we (Haas and other children with muscular dystrophy) were seven, we all went to camp and hung out together and there was about ten of us. We all grew up together and saw each other every once in a while. There’s only two or three of us left now.” Attending friends’ funerals was a part of growing up for Haas.

Still, she said she isn’t afraid to die. “The only thing I fear is that I won’t have what I want to get done, done by that age. I don’t want to leave unfinished business.” Part of her business is to have a normal life including a good job, husband and children.

“I’m normal. I don’t ask for or do anything different than anyone else, I just do it a different way,” she said.

“Everyone just wants to be considered normal. Don’t take for granted what anyone is like, we’re all different,” she said.

“Some disabled people are bitter, but you can also find someone on his feet who is bitter about life, or is depressed or rude. And people in wheelchairs or with disabilities are the same way, there are all different personalities and you shouldn’t expect them to be “nicey-nicey” or all of them to be rude. If you find a rude one—they aren’t all like that,” Haas said.

Some even drink beer.