transabled.org

 

• About
• Login
• Register
• Contact
• Accessibility

Google Search:
Web transabled.org Go

 

Home / Thoughts / Sean's Thoughts / Way to get an SCI?

Way to get an SCI?

Written by Sean on Monday, May 16, 2005

I was asked yesterday if I knew of a way to get a spinal cord injury. This visitor wanted me to tell him how to finally become a para. The thing is, I don’t know of a safe way to do it. If I did, chances are I would have used it on myself a while back. Chances also are that if I did know, I wouldn’t tell someone, for many reasons including one of liability.

The fact of the matter is, I’ve thought about several dozen ways to injure myself. All of them more hare-brained and stupid than the other. In the end, unless it’s *safe*, you really don’t want to go that way… Because one thing I’ve noticed is that we all have a very specific disability in mind. I want to be a low level para (L2-L3). Some want to be a high level para, with no feeling as high up as the nipples. Others want a LAK amputation, 4" above the knee.

Imagine how silly you’d feel if you aimed to have your back broken at T4, and ended up a C6 quad instead? Or how about managing to get a Traumatic Brain Injury that leaves you pretty much locked in to your own body, unable to communicate with the outside world? These disabilities are not the end of the world, obviously, but considering how definite our desires are, it seems that we’d not be happy with a level of disability other than the one we want/need.

So if I were to tell you I thought about hiring a thug in New York city to stab me in the back (what’s to stop him to kill me entirely?), or if I were to tell you about finding a corrupt doctor in Mexico (I might die of infection from a bad needle), or if I were to tell you about the rig(s) I considered to break my back (how do you explain the rig to the ambulance crew?). See, I’m sure you’ve had similar thoughts, and realised, just as I did, how stupid they were…

And since whatever way I considered won’t work, or isn’t safe, there’s no point in asking me.

Perhaps some day soon the folks at biid.org will manage to get avenues of treatment for transabled folks, and perhaps they’ll even realise that it doesn’t matter if it’s an amputation you seek or paraplegia, transability is transability. In the meantime, we all suffer…