Sometimes you just gotta let it go, because if you don’t you’ll just end up becoming something that’s not you. I just watched “The Doctor Who Makes People Walk Again?” which is a documentary about…here, have the official synopsis, it’ll explain it alot better than I would:

Vic, an Englishman, is one of hundreds of patients with motor neurone disease or spinal cord injuries that are travelling to Beijing for an operation that would be banned in the west. The operation is conducted by Dr Huang Hungyun, a man that some have hailed as miracle doctor and others have labelled a maverick. What Dr Huang does is the most controversial and pioneering procedure on the planet. He injects olfactory cells taken from aborted foetuses into the patient’s brain or spine. Dr Huang claims to have restored functions that Western doctors said were lost forever.

Sounds pretty….iffy doesn’t it? It does to me, and I’m on the other side of the table – I’ve been a permanently disabled T10 paraplegic for the last 10 years and to me, that whole thing smells so wrong on alot of levels. I can’t speak for everyone though, I’m not clinging onto false hopes and flashy offers like alot of people (and alot of people I know myself). The doco showed Vic and his family as they went through their stint at the Beijing hospital and the overwhelming thing I couldn’t help but shake my head at was how he and his wife just could not, they could not come to terms with the fact this was life now, their lives are dramatically different from how things where before and they couldn’t deal with that. The guy has 2 small kids, if he’s going to die within in the next two years wouldn’t it better to spend a small fortune and pack as much as you can into those years? So their memory of their dad isn’t one that’s tainted with false hopes. Thier mother had told them that after the surgery “he’d walk again” Well….the surgery came and went, and guess what didn’t happen? I know that my disability is different from motor neurone disease but I can still speak from experience and those kids are going to grow up thinking that a disability is the end of the world, which is just wrong. If you can just accept it, you’ll be fine. Which is probably pretty hard for people to swallow, I think I was kind of lucky in a way I was only 14 when it happened and I don’t think I missed out on much that I couldn’t do later on in my life, or not do at all and not be worried because I wasn’t missing out on much. I think if you’ve lead your life and in you’re in your 30’s or 40’s its a much harder road to hoe but it’s not impossible. There’s just no way you could honestly sit there and believe that this ‘miracle’ is going to help you, you just can’t. I think somewhere along the line good intentions and dollar signs got mixed up and now it’s more of “hey come to China and give us 50,000 American dollars and we’ll fix you, sure, I guess” But I could be wrong there, maybe the doctors truly do believe that they’d doing the right thing, but I just think it’s a way for them to prey on people, who can’t help themselves.

Somewhere along the line you have to have a serious hard look in the mirror and say ‘okay, yeah this isn’t the best thing that’s happened to me but I have alot more in me’ Which I’m assuming for anyone with a disability just sounds like me banging on the same old drum but I think there is a large percentage of people with disabilities that need to hear that. And probably would benefit from just talking to someone, not councilers or anything but someone else that’s been in the same spot they’re in. It’s hard, and it’s pretty scary but theres so much more to life. The guy in the doco, and the other people featured in the doco where the kind of people that I hate to be associated with, theres only so many times you can see a down on his luck cripple, down in the dumps before you just say “yeah, they’re all like it” or “geez, his life must suck” If you want to see people with disabilities thriving, look at the elite athletes – those guys make me want to suck my gut in. You can’t tell them that their lives are shitty because frankly they have lives most able bodied people would probably be a little jealous of. But sports aside what I’m grasping at it that your life is yours to lead and you’re allowed to hope and dream that one day you’ll be “normal” again but the rest of the time you need to reach down, somewhere, wherever you have too and suck it up. Put it aside and get on with your life, for however long you have left. I think one of the things that really just gets to me is how it’s so widely accepted that disability = end of your life (that and disability = asexual) but again, going back to the athletes, those guys are proof that nothing ends. I think maybe I’m trying to get at attitude, your attitude to how you filter things through your brain. I think if you meet me, for 5 minutes you’ll get the impression that I really don’t care about it, I’ve got so much more happening, and to do that I really don’t think it’s an issue. It’s just how life is now and thats that. It does not matter. And I can think of a handful of people that have the same attitude, and are great people who aren’t defined because of physical impairments. And I also know a handful of people that are in the same boat as Vic and his wife, just stuck…they’re stuck in the same spot they were as when it happened, they can’t get over it and they spend their lives caught up in this cycle. The sun rises and sets and they get older but they can’t climb over that hill. A friend of mine, a good friend of mine has actually had the olfactory surgery mentioned above, and it didn’t work, and I’m certain he’s not the only person that it failed on. It’s almost like there is party lines drawn, down one side you have the desperate and deluded and on the other side you have the people that just are made of stronger stuff and moved forward. It’s just so disheartening, you just want to get them and shake some sense into them, and make them see that there is so much more to it then being being stuck in a chair, theres countless people in worse situations that can deal.

It just gets to me when I see people like that painting people with disabilities in such a negative, ugly light. And you rarely ever see the other side of it, which makes me angry, it just reinforces the sad looks I get, or the pat on the shoulder from the random eldery person at the shops, etc. I’m happy to work twice as hard to prove that I have something to offer but when the general consensus is we’re ‘broken’ its like the finish line just keeps getting moved further away – and I get quite vocal about the whole thing, I want to yell at people and shake them into sense and reason and point them in the direction of people who have done so many awesome things with their lives, while sitting down. I’m certainly not superman, far from it, I’m just a guy. And I think I’ve finished this, I just wanted to get a few things out there

Sometimes you just gotta let things go, and regardless of what happens the world is still your oyster.