FORT WORTH (KTVT/CNN) - Dani Darouse is still getting used to it. A motorcycle wreck a little more than a year ago left her with one leg.
“I don’t like getting reminded that I’m handicapped,” Darouse said. But last week, her new reality hit her hard.
“I just wanted to go buy some pants and feel normal,” she said. She asked an employee at the Nordstrom Rack at Park Lane for the handicap stall to try on a few items. She needs a bench to sit down.
“The woman told me it was reserved for mothers with strollers, and I asked her, since it wasn’t occupied and it does have a handicap sign, if I might use it, and she still told me no,” Darouse said.
The two went back and forth, but the worker wouldn’t budge.
“There’s a handicap sign, and I didn’t know that meant women with babies,” Darouse said. Eventually another employee noticed the exchange and let her inside the dressing room.
“When you’ve got to sit there and explain, and kind of beg for it, you feel a lot more disabled,a lot more different, not so normal,” she said of the experience.
She said no one in the store seemed to care about her experience.
After being reached for comment, Nordstrom sent out a statement that said, “We take this very seriously. We are continuing to look into this incident and are addressing it with our teams.”
Darouse wants to spread awareness of these types of situations. She said she doesn’t want sympathy, pity or apologies. She just wants it to never happen again.
“It is a sensitive thing and people shouldn’t have to explain it,” she said.
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