People aren’t familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.
Personally, I like a generous side of wheelchair access with my cities.
I thought being in the wheelchair might be kind of limiting for me as an actor. It turned out cool in a lot of ways. Of course, at the end of the day, I can get up out of the chair and go home, but I’m very acutely aware that most people can’t, so I try to give the situation that depth.
The image of Stephen Hawking – who has died aged 76 – in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.
No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It’s perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.
All of a sudden, I don’t have a leg. I’m in a wheelchair. I have half a foot; I can’t even walk to the bathroom. I’m in a bed, I can’t move, and I felt like those four walls were my prison.
I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.
Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere… terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.
The doctors misdiagnosed me at first – they told me I had a pinched nerve. But my situation was getting worse. The tumor was cutting off the circulation in my nerves. And in two weeks’ time, I was left paralyzed. I went from a cane to crutches to a walker to a wheelchair.
I was bullied in high school. I would go through the hallways and be pointed at and laughed at because I was the new kid in a wheelchair.
My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.
I was on the wheelchair for six months and lost all hope of returning to the field. I thought my career was over, but my brother kept on encouraging me. ‘All that you need to do is to be resolute to return to the field,’ he said. These words turned out to be magical.
The people who criticise you will not be the ones taking care of your legs when you are in your wheelchair. People who never drove a car in these conditions, they just don’t know.
My father had several strokes and heart attacks. I was with him when he died, and it was a horrible death. He had been a very articulate man, and to lose that, never to be able to speak properly and to be unable to move – he had always been a very vigorous man, so to be in a wheelchair and mumbling – was terrible.
I don’t want to hang around in a wheelchair in a nursing home. I don’t. I don’t want to be like that.
There are days when my legs don’t work, so I have to be in my wheelchair.
I’ve seen Don Rickles up at the Montreal Comedy Festival. Don Rickles was doing jokes in a wheelchair, and he was headlining a show. Do you think they would let a woman do that?
A lot of the time, when people meet someone in a wheelchair, or with some disability, it’s the first thing they notice, but they don’t know how to react.
You can really do amazing things in a wheelchair. It’s very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, but you can even go up and down stairs in a wheelchair.
I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair: I’ve been doing it physically – it’s hard labour – throughout my life.
There are days when I’m spasming to a point where I can’t even push my wheelchair because my arms aren’t working and my legs aren’t working.
The battle to find a workplace that’s wheelchair accessible is a feat in itself, let alone an employer who’s going to be cool about employing someone with a disability in a job you actually want to do.
If you want to live a hundred years, how do you want to live your life? At the age of 100, you should go shopping with your great-grandchildren, but not in a wheelchair.
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