Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Disability


I believe in the concept of tipping points.  I’ve seen it in action in the world and in my own life, when experiences, or phenomena that are part of a continuum suddenly tip from one end and become part of the other.  So it is with disability.  Part of my job of developing new supportive housing projects is to educate housing developers about disability.   One thing I always stressed to them was that the world isn’t “us” and “them”, the world isn’t divided into the abled and the disabled.  Instead, we all exist on a continuum with ability at one extreme and disability at the other.  As we age, we journey along the continuum, but at any second, any of us, due to accident or illness, can tip from one to the other. 

Except for a broken ankle when I was a teenager, my stroke was my first experience with a disabling condition.  And what a condition it was.  For the first two weeks, I couldn’t even sit up in bed.  I made rapid progress, though, and after five weeks I was walking with a cane, and after eight weeks walking unassisted.  I’ve continued to make steady progress in my recovery, even though spasticity has slowed it somewhat.

The area where I notice the biggest difference in my physical abilities now compared to what I used to be able to do, is working around the house.  I still manage to get most of the needed repairs and maintenance done, just slower and with more effort.  There are some things I won’t even attempt, though, like going up the ladder to clean out the second story gutters.  I used to do that without a second thought. 

I live in southern Kentucky, a part of the country not north or south, sort of on a continuum between the two.  Indiana residents consider us southerners, Tennessee residents consider us northerners.  Similarly, our winter weather is  between the rain of the south and snow of the north.  We get a lot of ice. And our latest ice storm was this past weekend.  As ice storms go, it was minor, but it did deposit a layer of ice thick and heavy enough to bring  down a neighbor’s tree.  The neighbor lives across the street, and some of the tree made it to our yard, but only the topmost branches.   Since it blocked the city street, the city road crew was soon out to saw it up and haul it away, leaving us with only a bit of raking and hauling to do. 

As I drank coffee by the window and watched the road crew work, I remembered previous, more severe, ice storms when our own trees were brought down and I spent days  afterward cutting them up with my chainsaw and hauling the debris to the landfill with my utility trailer.  I recognized a tipping point had occurred in my life. The next time the ice brings down our trees, I won’t be able to clean up the damage.  Someone else will have to do it for me.  I realized that I could no longer do what those men were doing, I was no longer the person who could help others.  I had become the person who needed help from others.   

All of us face these changes in our lives and have to deal with them as best we can.  I know I’m not unique in this.  I’m just saying that we live on the continuum of life, and at those times when we are forced to notice how far we’ve come, and how short the distance is we have to go, it can be jarring.