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This page is all about answering people’s questions, starting from years back until present. You would be amazed at some of these encounters, but the world is thankfully big enough to accommodate everyone in all their glorious diversity. When I became disabled, not many people asked me things right away. Sometimes a total stranger would walk up to me with a strange comment or unusually nosy question.
I am one of those people you might see using a wheelchair, not the other way around, allowing the wheelchair to become a blanket excuse for others to treat me different or specially. I am as capable as any other woman I know and in some areas I excel over my peers. Everyone has things they are good at, but for me it has always been writing that I dreamt of excelling at to make connections with people who were open minded enough to take up a book I had written.
Over the years I have undergone several evolutions in my thinking on the subject as I take very seriously the responsibility I have to myself to face my own disability with bravery and courage. I strive to set an example to others about living life to the fullest and enjoy every moment of it. Sometimes though I am confronted by questions and even though I understand the curiosity of people, sometimes I think if they thought about it, they could answer their own questions.
It would be hard to list each question, so I will just go through them one at a time. Everyone knows I lost my left leg almost to the hip, right? Well, now that that is the set foundation, allow me to share some questions I have been asked over the years. "How can you drive?" My answer : "Just like you do, I was lucky not to need special adaptive equipment, since I still have the full use of the right leg and foot, I drive like everyone else. Only one exception, I cannot drive a standard transmission and that I can live with since I never could get out of 1st gear when I tried with two feet!"
"Do you still feel the other leg?" My answer: "Yes, and it feels a lot like how it feels when a foot or a hand falls asleep from lack of circulation. Sometimes it hurts and causes shocking nerve pains that are usually gone as quickly as they appear. Some of the sensations I have felt over the years include a hot ‘poker’ in my heel, feeling charlie horse pains from the ‘phantom limb’ into my stump, there have been times I can feel something as subtle as wind blowing over the ‘skin’ of the ‘phantom’ and a few times while in water, I have actually felt water, between the toes and over the ‘skin.’ For the most part, now after almost 13 years, I feel a pleasant ‘awareness’ of the missing leg that is rather comforting although I am still unable to move this ‘presence as I can move my real leg.
Even the toes are paralyzed, with the knee usually slightly bent, unless I stand and walk, when it seems to straighten out slowly on its own. On this subject, I find it interesting to not for you, that during my meeting with Rick Allen, fellow amputee, we talked about it and he also feels it still as well, sensations similar to the above description. My recently passed grandmother was also an amputee, below her left knee, and eventually toes from her right foot. She was diabetic as was her sister, my great aunt Mary, who was also a below the knee amputee, also the left leg lost. Both of their surgeries were ‘planned’ and not like Rick & I where blunt trauma is involved.
I recall asking both of them, upon seeing them for the first time, I was about 14 or so at the time, "Can you still feel it?" Another interesting side note, my great grandfather had lost two digits of one of his index fingers and I was about three or four around this time, and I asked him too. It is remarkable to add that later upon asking my grandmother if she still felt it, she said she didn’t. I have heard that this is attributed to the differences in how we each became amputees.
It is interesting to me how the mind adapts to its own changing environment, as seen with amputees and their ‘phantom sufferings.’ Since I have experienced this firsthand, I feel that I am in a unique situation as a writer and as a person. From this standpoint I have 18 years of body memory intact and now added to it, almost 13 living with levels of pain daily that would drain anyone, believe me. I broke my back, pelvis, right leg in seven places that has seen three surgeries to set and fix it properly. Biofeedback in a clinical situation can help some people to train their minds to negate the pain and cope with it as it happens.
I have meditated and experimented throughout my life with working to influence things in my body that we weren’t supposed to have control over, starting with the heart. I am able to ‘will’ it to slow down and I can put myself in a state that allowed me to swim the length of a pool and back underwater without surfacing for air. That goes back to childhood. But after becoming disabled in 87’ I had not tried to do anything regarding pain, because my frame of reference at the time did not include the horrific agonies I would suffer after that accident.
Right there in a nutshell, "Frame of Reference" is the reason the mind is able to adapt, guided by our own conscious will. I believe that is why some people look upon amputees with a feeling of facing their own mortality. If a person hasn’t considered what possibilities exist in a world where people die in accidents every day. People need to be aware to truly be alive and if seeing me rolling along with my beautiful child, inspires someone to rethink actions in their personal life, I am sympathetic to them, but I encourage them to face the consequences of bad judgments.
Accepting the inevitability of death frees you to live life to the fullest. When disability touches your life, things change in ways you never dreamed of. People treat you differently and you begin to see yourself and the world around you in different lights. Even if the way it touches your life is through a friend or family member, you begin asking more questions and seeking answers about the world and how people in it treat one another. To change the world all one needs to do is change themselves.
"Been in any good wheelchair races lately?" Not how I like to be greeted by a person who had made fun of me in school before my accident and then seeing me while shopping in a grocery store, but this has happened more then once from different acquaintances, I would rather have not talked to. That is one thing I would never ask a disabled person, unless you know that they specifically participate in that type of sport. Otherwise it’s insulting
I have been told by people who had come to see me right after the accident, during my stay in Bayfront Medical Center, that : "I could never live like that, I feel so sorry for you Pam." Certainly this was their minds way of trying to empathize within their ‘frame of reference’ what living in mine would be like. It isn’t as bad as some might think. I am fully capable of carrying my son’s baby bag, my purse, hold him on my lap and get into our apartment without having to need a ramp, just out of sheer desire for independence and the upper body strength, developed over years in the wheelchair.
So this is he beginning of this page and I invite you to email any question you want answered here to me and it will be added here. Thank you for visiting my Disability Questions page!
