some said the local lake had been enchanted.

Aug 17, 2009 10:43

1. I am both repulsed and intrigued. And hungry.

2. We have issues:

Amand-r: I bet Rhys is the occasional cuddler.
Foxy: Rhys, yeah.
Amand-r: with his massive bear paws.
Foxy: MAUL MAUL MAUL
Amand-r: he and Jack should get into one of those girly slap fights with their giant man hands. It'd be like if you and I strapped tennis rackets on our ( Read more... )

links to stuff, chit-chat, recipes, dreams, porn, halp, music, torchwood

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Comments 56

beesandbrews August 17 2009, 15:47:33 UTC
My mom is a quad due to an accident she had several years ago. There's no flipping way she's ever getting out a chair again. But, that doesn't change the fact that she's convinced that one of these days someone is going to come up with a therapy or a treatment or something and she's gonna walk. If mobility is something you had, if the opportunity is there, then unless your character is a hopeless head case, (and she's not), she's going to grab it with both hands. (even if the process is long, difficult and painful)

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amand_r August 17 2009, 15:51:12 UTC
Ah, you hit it for me. What I don't want to do is marginalise those in chairs now by having Lisa reject the chair for a cure. Like, "oh you cured her in the fic because there's something WRONG with being paraplegic." That is what I want to avoid. It only occurred to me last night when I was writing something else, that I might have made a grevious error.

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copperbadge August 17 2009, 15:55:55 UTC
I don't know if it's quite the same, but I wrote an arc in one of my fics where Lisa lost an arm to Canary Wharf, and we as readers enter her life on the day she gets a new high-tech prosthetic arm, which is a huge help to her -- she immediately feels whole again, that she has her arm "back", etc. I didn't have any complaints about it. On the other hand it wasn't the major arc of the fic, so. Take that for what it's worth :)

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amand_r August 17 2009, 16:06:20 UTC
That's useful. Also slightly amusing, as I was, before I settled on paraplegia, going to make her a double amputee (I had decided to take her legs away for the story), but decided that the medical complications with paraplegia were better suited to the issues dealt with in the story. Now I'm really glad I didn't stay with that.

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sthayashi August 17 2009, 16:46:25 UTC
I'm pretty sure that few to no one complained about a commercial that ran a number of years ago that showed Christopher Reeve getting up and walking from a wheelchair. And this wasn't a small commercial, it ran during the friggin' Superbowl!

I found a good Time article that may be worth reading in your case. TL;DR, the only issue people had with the commercial was the notion of giving false hope.

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amand_r August 17 2009, 17:15:18 UTC
I thought a lot about CR when I was writing this up, becasue there's an example of a person who was determined NOT to be in his chair anymore. On the other hand, and not to minimise the paraplegic issue, he was a quad. This is a person who has to be on a ventilator, let alone all the other issues that come with being almost fully paralysed. I think the extent of his injury, coupled with his ability to influence change as a celebrity, and his sheer activeness before he became paralysed fed into CR's stance on cure.

On the other hand, I kind of agree with the author of the article. I'd never seen the commercial before. There has to be some sort of happy medium between the two viewpoints, though. It's NOT just around the corner, but it could happen someday, so there has to be some balance.

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sthayashi August 17 2009, 17:55:09 UTC
Ok, I just went to transabled.org and read up on people with BIID. I'll have to chat with you off LJ about it when I'm not at work.

Brief thoughts: No one in the "transabled" community should be offended by an ending where one gets to walk away from their chair. There are some who can honestly say that their lives are better as a result of their injury than it would have been before. But we live in a time where hardly anything is wheelchair accessible and in some cases even "wheelchair accessible" locations can make one feel like a second class citizen, even if they're otherwise completely independent.

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amand_r August 17 2009, 17:57:15 UTC
There are some who can honestly say that their lives are better as a result of their injury than it would have been before.

That was some of what I was getting over there and I didn't want to harsh that vibe.

Or rather, I think I'm pretty confident in my approach now, but I want to keep that alternate vp in my head when I write.

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easilymused1956 August 17 2009, 20:45:51 UTC
Okay, here goes. I lived in a care center aka nursing home for three years. While there I met paraplegics and quadriplegics. And they would have gotten out of those 'special' chairs in a half=second if offered the chance to walk again.

I personally spent over two years in a wheelchair, and would have given it up in a half-second.

One thing that truly pissed me off was when people would say things like, 'Wish I had a wheelchair so I could *whatever*!'

If only they knew...

Anyway, I can walk (not that particularly well) now, and I never want to have to use that chair again. Go for that fic!

Renee

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amand_r August 17 2009, 20:51:35 UTC
Oh thank you so much! WTF with people wishing for a wheelchair? do you think they were trying to be nice? I dunno, sometimes I think people go out of their way to try not to sound pitying or whatever, mostly because they don't get how they should act around the chair, especially when they don't know a lot of people who are in them? I dunno. I actually don't know anyone who uses a wheelchair, so sometimes I find myself looking and thinking about the issues that it brings up. Maybe that's a faux pas.

I appreciate your comments. I really was unsure if I was handling the situation in an insensitive manner, but everyone seems to be in agreement about it. I shall forge ahead with the original plan.

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moljn August 18 2009, 06:03:57 UTC
I went to school with a boy who needed a wheelchair. He'd get a new one periodically, and while I don't think anyone wished for the chair per se, there was always a good bit of interest in what the new chair could do (this was twenty years ago, so they were pretty basic and bulky electric chairs). Also, his mother made the coolest "halloween" outfits around it and they always won the contest, which seemed a bit unfair.

Anyway, today I might comment on some cool feature of a wheelchair, but I can see how that could come off as patronizing. We're not kids anymore, so yeah, I don't know if it's better to ignore the chair or what.

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amand_r August 18 2009, 14:01:36 UTC
Yeah, I think the jury is somewhat out on that one. Although I get that it's almost worse when people deliberately don't look at you.

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phaetonschariot August 17 2009, 21:09:35 UTC
Hell, it's got to have more grace than the Stargate bodyswap thingor.

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amand_r August 17 2009, 21:10:32 UTC
You mean the latest casting call? Yeah, that was weighing on my mind.

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