Dear ME: The last time I used a regular bathroom scale, in 1965, I weighed 170 pounds. Due to the inconvenience of a plane crash later that day, I didn’t eat for a week. When I regained consciousness, my appetite disappeared along with every muscle in my lower body. Later I was told I weighed 130 pounds, but I never saw the scale since I was lying naked on a cold gurney at the time.

Since then I’ve regained my appetite, but have been searching for a place to weigh myself. About 30 years ago I found a rehab facility with a wheelchair scale, 70 miles roundtrip. I went there once a week, then once a month, and finally lost interest. Too far, too time-consuming. When I moved to a farm, I tried weighing with the cattle. This required lowering myself from my wheelchair, scooting on my butt through cow poop, then boosting my butt on to the cattle scale, where I got a semi-accurate weight. That lasted about as long as my shoulders did.

Ten years ago I found a laundry scale at a hospital. To weigh, I roll out my kitchen door, down a ramp, out to my minivan, transfer and pull my chair in, scoot behind the steering wheel, drive to the city, search for an accessible parking place and settle for regular parking in the far lot, unload my chair and transfer, roll down the hill, through the automatic doors, make a right, go down a hall and weigh, unless the giant laundry cart full of hospital linens is hogging the scale, then roll out the automatic doors, up the hill to the far parking lot, transfer into my minivan, scoot behind the steering wheel, drive back to the farm, unload my chair and transfer, roll back to the house, up the ramp, and into the kitchen. The whole process takes about 40 minutes. I don’t do it that often.

Last week I went to see my primary care physician, who practices in a medical clinic that is part of a large system. Rolling down the hall, I noticed a new portable scale, but it was not for wheelchairs. When I asked the nurse about it, she told me the staff had requested a wheelchair accessible scale, but the clinic’s board turned them down. Too expensive, they said.

The cardiology clinic where I go since undergoing my quintuple bypass, and later a stent implantation, is housed in a new building that cost $50 million. The new medical equipment in that clinic cost millions more. I asked for a wheelchair scale to be included prior to construction, but I guess they couldn’t afford an additional few thousand dollars.

Here’s my dilemma: Should I assume, 19 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that the medical establishment is exempt from the ADA? Perhaps they are entitled to hardship status and can’t afford to give patients in wheelchairs the same medical care as nondisabled patients? Is 19 years not long enough? Need another 90 days to understand the law?

Or should I urge readers of this magazine to systematically begin suing every last medical establishment in the nation for willful discrimination against an entire class of citizens?