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Andrew Farrow, at Living Your Potential, has only good things to say about Karen Darke and her site. I did take a look but, for me, it flagged up the motivational chasm between the neuro-wheelie and broken spine wheelie.
Ever wondered why neuro-wheelies get totally fed up at the '...and then she climbed Everest in her wheelchair…' approach to life? Well, it's because, for most of us, it just isn't possible. We are sick people, dealing with debilitating, uncertain, illnesses that vary in progression and severity. Our medication often makes us sicker and more frail. Pain is our constant companion. Exercise may make us worse, not better. We cannot build compensating strengths.
The Health Service doesn’t really like us because it cannot make us better. We are often told, 'it is all in your mind' because our illnesses are internal, not obvious. We have to fight to even get doctors to look at us a lot of the time. We depress medical professionals – we cost a lot, we give no job satisfaction – we just keep slowly deteriorating, whatever they, or we, do. We get NO rehabilitation, NO physiotherapy. We get bags of numbing medication; we go home and learn to live with inexorable, unpredictable, deterioration, alone and in silence... OK, maybe not in complete silence!
We, neuro-wheelies, do admire those young(ish), fit, broken spine wheelies who are motivated by, and succeed in, physical endurance tests but, for us, being told to look at 'x' who climbed Everest is not at all inspiring. When you cannot lift your arms to feed yourself and you never will be able to, being expected to climb Everest is just ... annoying!
Neuro-wheelies may be equally determined to live a life of good quality but our psychological and physical objectives have to be different from those who have a broken spine. We require a different range of motivational skills to inspire us... and that's not a range within the skill-set of many! If you know anyone that can inspire a person to face the rest of their life gradually losing all their sensory and motor skills, possibly their mental acuity too … drop me a line or a link and I’ll pass it on – frankly, we need all the help we can get!
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