Some thoughts on wheelchairs.

I apologise in advance for the length of this post and the philosophical nature of it all, but hey...it's been raining and somehow that gets you thinking about deep and meaningful stuff...

Last weekend, I was at an airport and it got me wondering about wheelchairs. Now, this time, I was with a single friend, but normally I am in my chair with a bunch of other people – themselves largely wheelchair users. There’s a group of us, some full time chair users (like E2O), and some not (like me), but all of us relish the freedom that a wheelchair gives us. In an airport it’s the difference between being able to go to the shops, nip to the loo, head out and look out the window, nip back for coffee and then get to the plane feeling fine. The alternative to all this is – arrive at airport, find somewhere to sit down, struggle to boarding gate picking up coffee if you pass one then sitting down at the gate to wait (probably in pain) having hopefully found somewhere to sit down on the way, if you need to be at Gate 103. Hmmm, which would you do then? Which is better, which gives you more independence – more freedom, less pain?

It sounds an easy answer doesn’t it? So why are people so determined to struggle in these situations? What is it about the human condition that makes us say ‘at least I can still walk’ – ‘I can manage!’ Manage, yes, but at what cost? This has been a really hard lesson for me to learn, but I wish I had learned it years ago and now when I look back I think that I was stupid in some of the ways that I struggled to keep up and made myself stay on my own two feet just for the sake of pride.

Wheelchair dancer wrote some stuff on this and she commented on the way that people seem to regard a wheelchair as robbing people of their independence and I hope she doesn’t mind if I cut and paste....

The saddest thing for me is, however, the bog standard wheelchairs. Have you ever noticed that no one who does not own a wheelchair to begin with ever pushes themselves? The chairs are heavy. Yes. So heavy .... I know they're industrial. They're supposed to be functional for everyone. But they aren't freedom machines. They aren't independence devices. They are transport things, designed for the pusher. Everyone in them has this kind of blanked out look.


This is so true – once in a chair people seem to expect to be pushed. They become one with the chair and not in a good way. They are the chair – the chair is a symbol of being incapable, of being abnormal and yes, that is really sad to be that way.

I find that I say to people that I hate my chair when it sits in the corner of my room and looks at me, telling me that I am disabled but I love it when I am in it. I love that freedom. I too am part of my chair (or it is part of me) but I love it. It gives me ‘legs’ that work properly, it gives me speed and balance. It helps me manage my pain – I can go further, I can go faster, I can carry things – it gives me so much I can’t begin to explain...