Disability as Combat

I've never liked the metaphor of disability as a battle. It sounds as if disability is a war with tools that can make the disability go away.

In the same vein, I wince every time I see an obituary with "after a long battle with cancer" or some other disease. Sometimes with illness, it can be cured or at least put into remission.

If you're talking about a choice to go on with your life and cope versus staying in bed and turning your face to the wall, the big news is that this is a choice every person has.

Why make disability into a personal war? Are there hills to take? Bridges to destroy? This immediately places the person into a role where he or she is forced to be a combatant or a coward, instead of a person who makes their own decisions about the direction of their life. The person with a disability is expected to put forth extraordinary effort to no longer be who they are. It's one thing to have surgery to deal with painful spasticity and another to have chancy surgery to gain just another degree of mobility. It's for the individual to choose and no judgment should be made if the decision is no.

As hard as it was for me to take, I respected my mother's decision to have chemotherapy when she was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Already in precarious health, it was extremely doubtful that chemo would extend her life and would certainly degrade the quality of her life. I wished that she had done more in previous years to reach out to life - to find out how she could best become more mobile, how she could improve her health. Still, it was her choice. It was hard for me to accept it, but I did.

If there comes a point in the life of a person with a disability that he decides enough is enough, enough with the surgery, enough with this or that or whatever painful treatment with a minimum of return, then that's enough. Respect that.

It doesn't mean that he's a coward. It only means that he's comfortable in his own skin and makes his own decisions.

It's not a war. It's not a battle. It's living life day by day, every day.