No nice wheelchairs?
This morning I read in the Guardian’s Society supplement an article by Judith Cameron, a freelance writer who looks after a severely-disabled daughter, Sophie. Cameron has written a monthly column about caring for her daughter in the supplement called Who Cares?, and in today’s column she took umbrage to a doctor who complemented her on her daughter’s “nice” wheelchair.
However, last week, instead of the usually feeling of friendliness towards him, I felt like slapping him. He made the unforgivable remark that Sophie’s wheelchair looked “nice”.
Of course, I recognise that without a wheelchair my daughter would have no means of transport, and it is an invaluable piece of equipment for anyone who cannot walk. …
However, there is no way that a wheelchair should ever be described as nice. Although I acknowledge the need for the wheelchair, I hate what it represents – and, in my experience, only two groups of people are insensitive enough not to realise this.
I took a look back at Cameron’s other articles; she started the column in May this year. Sophie is not simply physically disabled; her disability is the result of an illness and she is also brain damaged. I only found this out by searching the Guardian’s archive, but my first thoughts on reading this column was that it was all about her feelings. Of course, in this case, the actual disabled person seems unable to tell us her feelings.
It seems that, in writing this column, Ms Cameron did not ask any disabled people what they thought their wheelchairs represented, and whether they would take umbrage and feel like slapping someone who remarked on their nice wheelchair. Don’t some disabled people take pride in their chairs and modify them in ways that reflects something of their personality?
I’m lucky enough not to be disabled, and for that matter I don’t know any disabled people (except two online acquaintances, one of them blind and the other suffering from a muscle-wasting disease). I don’t have any statistics to hand about how people under about 60 end up in wheelchairs, but spinal injury is a fairly common cause. With this type of injury, compared to impotence, incontinence, losing the sensation in large parts of your body so that you don’t know there’s something wrong with part of it until it’s too late, and so on, being in a wheelchair in itself sounds like one of the lesser afflictions.
Not exactly my usual subject material, I know, but the writer’s apparent self-absorption prompted me to write all this. What would a disabled person say if you said something positive about their chair?
