My day, on paper, has many similarities to the way it was before I became disabled. I’m still up with the lark, drink black coffee from my beloved Brexit mug and lie on the chaise longue with my laptop, ready to face the day and the deadline. When sufficient words have been wielded, there may well be a bathing, a menu to peruse and cocktails to pursue.
The difference is that I can’t walk anymore – with all the trouble that immobility brings. My bowels, bladder and bedsores are constantly in some corner of my mind; I’m either dreading the attention they will soon require or recovering from their capricious demands. It takes twice as long just to fashion myself into what I still think of as half a person; on bad days not even that, but a broken doll assembled from different doll pieces that don’t fit, shoved together by some malicious child. On a really bad day, Ducky from Toy Story; Pez dispenser head, baby doll body, plunger base.
In the face of this, I feel something approaching astonishment when I survey what I think of as the Wheelchair Warriors, who pursue very different goals but who see their chariots as launching pads from which to project themselves to new heights of excellence.
There are the athletes of the Invictus Games, in the news so much recently. There is the actress and producer Ruth Madeley, currently to be seen in The Rapture. There is the glamorous woman Lorraine Mack, who survived an accident in a nightclub to become an advocate for those of us with spinal injuries. They say you’ve got to see it to be it – but regarding all of these disparate comrades in wheels, I only feel even more of a Wheelchair Wimp, as I use mine solely for humdrum scootings between hospital-style bed, commode and couch.
How do they look so clean? So smart? So put-together? Keeping myself the right side of bag-lady seems to take all my efforts not actually invested in making a living and living it up. And then there’s what they do on top of that! The idea of showing up for hours of physical training six days a week, as the Invictus lot do, makes me feel faint. The schedule of Madeley – not only lead actress and executive producer of her latest TV show, but a fundraiser for the charity Whizz Kids since she was herself a child – makes me want to retreat to bed and stay there. The perfect grooming of Mack makes me want to put a bag over my head and have done with it.
Can I blame my advanced age for this lack of desire to make a role model out of myself? The athletes tend to be young; Madeley is in her 30s, Mack in her 50s; I’m an OAP, so obviously I’m going to be slowing down a bit. While I admire their good looks, I can’t help seeing the attraction in letting oneself go to seed; to be born female is to some extent to be expected to tart oneself up for public approval from an increasingly early age, with some “skincare” ranges now aimed at eight-year-olds. I started slapping on the lipstick, powder and paint when I was 12; am I expected to present “la bella figura” to the world until I drop down dead? A part of me believes that it would be a lot more fun to take Catherine Tate’s cackling, cursing “Nan” as my role model.
I suppose a lot of my trouble stems from the fact that I became disabled and I became old at the same time, overnight. Before my spinal surgery, though I was already in my 60s, I didn’t behave like someone in their sixties might generally behave. My friends and my husband were younger than me; I could work hard and play hard; I had no plans to stop writing, ever.
When I saw my hospital release summary, the words “retired – lives alone” leapt out at me with the force of a physical blow. The lines from that Mary Hopkins song I’d loved as a little girl came to my mind: “In the glass I saw a strange reflection – was that lonely woman really me?” I’m not lonely, but I am “fragile” and I am “vulnerable” and after a lifetime of feeling as if I was made of titanium and tungsten, that’s the strangest way to be.
That’s why I feel such incomprehension regarding the full-to-bursting lives of those WWs referred to here. For me, just getting my head around what has happened to me takes up the part of my brain that should be branching out. Taking up a new activity. Travelling further than the end of the high street. Mack, for example, has been skydiving; the nearest I get to that is falling out of my wheelchair when I’m drunk.
Will there ever come a day when I can become as bold in my wheelchair as I was on my long, swaggering legs, which led me into so many adventures? Or have I used up all my oomph, and might as well get used to being someone to whom people frequently say “Bless you!”? How can I live my best life when I’m in thrall to that cruellest of mistresses, my catheter? When I get excited about a consignment of nappies being imminent?
“Where’s the rest of me?” How I and many other arrogant Ableds laughed when we heard a young Ronald Reagan, the former US President, speak that line in the film Kings Row, on finding out that an evil doctor had amputated his legs. My legs are still there, and I feel lucky for that. But the part of me that took chances, chased change and embraced uncertainty appears to have departed, probably forever. It’s my nerve which has gone – so I’ll never be a Wheelchair Warrior.
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