According to Merriam-Webster, disabled is defined as “impaired or limited by a physical, mental, cognitive, or developmental condition.” I can only speak for myself, but the only reason I feel impaired or limited at the moment is because of doctor’s orders.
The after-hospital notes say that I wasn’t supposed to lift more than 5-10 pounds (about a full jug of milk). I got that note after surgery for SEEG testing and after getting Sparky implanted. We have a dog who’s 15 years old and can’t get up and down the stairs on his own. He weighs 18 pounds. After SEEG testing, I was carrying him on the stairs after about two days. After getting Sparky, it was about a week.
Surgery was four weeks ago… I feel fine! Sure, I probably deserved a severe finger wagging after carrying a box holding a bunch of cans of dog food up the stairs yesterday, but I feel fine! I think if I was feeling injured or sick or miserable or something, it’d be much more difficult to forget some of those after-hospital notes.
I may be misremembering the details—it’s probably been 25-30 years since I saw the movie—but I keep thinking about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest starring Jack Nicholson. What I remember is that it takes place in a mental institution. The mental patients are treated like mental patients, so that’s how they behave. When Jack starts treating them like normal people, guess how they start behaving? Like normal people!
And it feels like the line between “abled” and “disabled” is really thin and wavy, not nearly as concrete as the language might make it seem. I don’t feel impaired or limited while carrying my dog up and down the stairs. While writing blog entries. While acting like a human being. So am I truly disabled? Or are we just debating semantics?
Here’s what I suggest: find someone who has epilepsy, treat them like a normal person, then see how their behavior compares to other “normal people.” But if you find that person, decide ahead of time that they’re disabled, then treat them like they’re disabled, there’s nothing they’ll be able to do to change your mind or your behavior.
Comments
One response to “NEAM, Day 18: What makes you think that we’re disabled?”
Shawn, I’ve known you since you were a teen but I didn’t know you had epilepsy until we worked together almost every day and you mentioned it to me. You were then, “my friend, Shawn”. Never “my friend, Shawn, who has epilepsy”. And that’s how it is today.
My dad had epilepsy. The thing was that he could feel an episode coming on so he wouldn’ go to work that day. Or he would call my mom from work and she would go pick him up and bring him home. He seldom drove. Dad’s illness wasn’t discussed at all in our home. Dad was just Dad. If he wanted to do something or go somewhere, there wasn’t a discussion about how he felt. He just did it.
His mother, however, was a different story. She was always asking if he should be working in the yard, taking a hike with us kids, changing the oil in the car. First thing she would ask upon seeing him was, “How do you feel?”
Grandma would look at her son and see someone with a disability. Someone to be watched over and protected. Mothers can be like that.
Mama would expect her husband to respond to his daily life as anyone else would, knowing that if he didn’t feel well, he would say so. Just as he would if he had a sore throat or a tummy ache. To Mama, Daddy’s epilepsy didn’t define him.