Playing Cards at Boston Children's Hospital by Lisa Blumberg was linked in a blog I was looking at and it's a really good and important piece. It made me really upset to read it.
It was striking to me how much I related as an Autistic person to the professional attitudes that Blumberg experienced, since she has cerebral palsy and no mind disabilities. I'm kind of leery about doing this because I don't want to give the impression of appropriating someone else's very different experience, but I want to quote some of the lines that really resonated with me:
Once Matty [her physical therapist] watched me walk and said, "You don't concentrate. You just go--like you think you walk normally or something."
I tried to explain it to my mother: "They exalt form over substance." I didn't have the right words...
When Blumberg was in her first year of college, a doctor spent months pressuring her and her mother to agree to a surgery that involved cutting into Blumberg's muscles, even though Blumberg really, really didn't want it. The doctor constantly told them that if she didn't get the surgery, her hips would dislocate by the time she was forty (then he kept lowering the age at which this would supposedly happen). As an adult, she found out that there was no way this would have happened before she was very old.
By Monday, after five days without movement, both my legs were sticks. I screamed when Matty touched them. She sat me up. I fell over. "You make me sick," I said to Pan later. That was obviously an understatement...Matty said I was being terrible to Dr. Pan. She said he knew I didn't like him.
Nine days after surgery, I went home and that was when the fun really began. There was a problem with pain management. The problem was that Pan was not interested. He said his concern was with correcting my leg, not with how I felt while he was doing it. Both my legs now hurt everywhere, but he had only cut one muscle on one leg, so I could not blame all this on him, no indeed. Anyway, I was just faking.
... Throughout July and August, while the pain turned into aches, I had therapy. My hamstrings and some of my hip muscles were doing weird things. I couldn't straighten out my legs the way I used to. My left leg--the leg that was supposed to be untouched--was turning in.
At first Matty pretended things had been this way all along but then finally said, "When you cut a muscle, every other muscle reacts. When you do something to one leg, the other changes."
No one had told me. I had not been playing with a full deck.
"Why did he do it?" I screamed.
"If you don't take risks, you don't do anything," Matty said crossly. "It's not like you had a great walk to begin with."
So it was spoken, so it was said. I had a disability to begin with. It was all right for other people to take risks with me.
...By 1979 I had oozed into the disability rights movement and for the first time met other adults with disabilities. Many of these people had been "treated" at a local pediatric orthopedic hospital I'll call Newcastle, since this article really isn't about Newcastle. The first thing I heard about was the amphitheater where the kids were examined in front of students and whoever. This was a new one on me.
Then I heard about the surgery--lots of it. As someone said, "surgery was all there was." Three, five, seven, eighteen operations on one person. Sometimes one surgery would be successful and then, well, the next one would be sort of a mistake.
I asked Bette what the hell was going on. She said that kids at Newcastle were looked at from an orthopedic perspective but did not necessarily get rehab. For kids who had lasting disabilities rather than, say, a club foot, that was a problem. People did not understand that. Even most primary physicians did not recognize this...It occurred to me that if your focus is on a fix, working with individuals with lifelong disabilities must be aggravating--aggravating enough to make you swear or become a gambling man.
(emphasis mine)
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