Disability, Adversity and Victory

Last year a friend posted something on my Facebook wall that I was just starting to understand about my own battle with ALS. You see, in spite of whatever accomplishments or shortcomings I may have had in my pre-ALS life, strangers now either look past me or look on me with uncomfortable (for them) pity and curiosity.

 

Yet, I'm the same person, with the same mind albeit in a physically deteriorated state. The thing I've come to realize is that my perspective on life and living, which I took for granted 8 years ago, has become a strength I can use to share with people. Hopefully, I can help them see that my life and ability to make a contribution aren't over because I have a disease with no cure. Maybe I can even turn their pity into a realization that the next guy they meet in a wheelchair who "Doesn't look quite right.",  just may be as "normal" as they are.

"Some of the world's greatest men and women have been saddled with disabilities and adversities but have managed to overcome them. Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell, and you have a John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have a Benjamin Disraeli. Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt. Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set a world's record in 1934 for running a mile in 4 minutes, 6.7 seconds. Deafen a genius composer, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven. Have him or her born Black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you ohave a Booker T. Washington, a Harriet Tubman, a Marian Anderson, or a George Washington Carver. Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen children, and you have an Enrico Caruso. Have him born of parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he is four, and you have an incomparable concert violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Call him a slow learner, "retarded," and write him off as ineducable, and you have an Albert Einstein." -- Unknown