MINNEAPOLIS — Lin Hood is always going somewhere. She has run marathons and climbed Kilimanjaro.
Her body changed when she became quadriplegic in 2018, but her will hasn’t changed. This is especially true after she learned that even something as simple as using a public bathroom was becoming incredibly hard.
“The floor was wet when we got there.” It was chilly. “It was dirty,” Hood said. “It was awful and I looked at my husband and thought, this is disgusting.”
She thought, If babies have changing tables, why don’t kids and adults?
Hood got to work and got the first changing table for adults in U.S. Bank Stadium. He also helped get the first one at the Minnesota State Fair, and now it’s the law in Minnesota that changing tables have to be in big, public new buildings.
Hood’s goal this month was to talk about airport bathrooms in Washington, D.C.
“All I could do was ask, ‘When are they going to listen?'” She said, “I need someone to hear me.”
They did it. Hood says that Minnesota congressmembers Betty McCollum and Dean Philips welcomed her with open arms. She told them about the stories of friends like Prince Cole, who is from Liberia but lives in Minnesota and really wants to go back home more often.
“I get really scared every time I go to the airport.” “I worry about going to the bathroom,” Philips said. “You have to get changed and get changed on the floor so some people would rather stay at home than go through that, a humiliating experience.”
Hood pushed back against the norm, and the bill passed in the Senate. Airports in the United States will soon have to have changing rooms for adults.
“I got results and if I could have jumped out of this chair and jumped to the moon, I would have done it,” said Hood. “I was that happy and full of energy.” I was thrilled. “I felt so good that I wanted to hug everyone in Washington and tell them, ‘Well done, good and faithful servants.'”
“When I found out the change was coming, I was like, ‘Thank God for Linda,'” said Philips.
Because Hood can climb any rock.
There are already two changing tables for adults at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. One is in Concourse D and the other is near where you get your bags.
Hood’s next job is to make federal laws more general, and she is pushing the Olympic Committee to add changing rooms for adults at their events.
