Mrs. Costilow

I entered my third-grade classroom with the trepidation that always accompanies the first day of school. It was a new teacher, one my older sister had never had. Her name was Mrs. Costilow. She was sitting in a large black chair in the front of the room, and after the bell rang and we all recited the Pledge of Allegiance together, she told us to come sit around her on the floor. As we crossed our legs in front of us and looked up at her, she pushed a small knob on her chair and moved towards us. I knew it was a wheelchair; I had seen them before. Mrs. Costilow turned to us, and started telling us a story.

She told us that one day she had been going to a meeting with three other teachers. They were crossing a train track, had looked both ways, but when they were driving over the tracks something happened to the car. It was stopped. They tried to get it started, but it wouldn’t go. Then, she told us, they heard the sound of a train. The other teachers got out of the car, but Mrs. Costilow was caught in her seatbelt. She was stuck in the car and the train hit her. Her legs got hurt so badly, she had to get new ones, she told us. Then she reached down, took off her leg, and held it up for us to see. “This is what my new legs look like,” she told us. She passed the leg around, but I didn’t want to touch it. She sat in her chair, rubbing the part of her leg that was left. There was a sock-like thing around the end of her leg. She told us that was to protect it, and that sometimes the fake legs hurt. She told us they were hard to walk on, so she used a wheelchair.

Mrs. Costilow never really talked about her legs after that first day. It seemed normal to have a teacher in a wheelchair. She was a lot of fun. Sometimes she would run over our feet in her chair (it didn’t hurt). In the Faculty Follies, a show where the teachers act out songs that they like, she played “The leader of the pack.” She pretended her wheelchair was a motorcycle. One day she got a flat tire and we had to wait in the hall for the janitor to pump it back up.
I always liked Mrs. Costilow, not for her legs or her wheelchair, but because she was a good teacher. When I was a freshman in college, my mother, who is a minister, took a job at a different church on the other side of town. My first time there, I saw Mrs. Costilow. She walks with crutches now instead of using her wheelchair. She was still nice.

My third-grade teacher was my first obvious encounter with anyone with a disability. I had grown up with my uncle, who is blind, but we never out-right talked about that until I was older. Mrs. Costilow came right out and talked about being in a wheelchair. When I read through the website cripcommentary.com, I couldn’t help but think about Mrs. Costilow. Maybe she was lucky that my elementary school was built during the seventies, and the coolest thing about it was the long, sloping ramps. She seemed so good-natured and open about everything that had happened to her. Maybe she had to be, since she taught eight-year old children.

Driving Blind

My Uncle Jeff is legally blind. When he was in high school he started losing his vision, and it went quickly. I grew up seeing his lack of vision as normal. I don’t remember if we ever had a big “revealing” or if it was just something I grew to understand, but my Uncle Jeff always looked sidelong at you. He always sat right next to the television, he asked his wife whether the platter in front of him had the dark sausage rolls or the light sausage rolls, because he couldn’t tell. He earned his degree from TTU in psychology, he holds a job working for the state as a psychologist, and he even competes in triathlons and half marathons. I’ve always respected him for just being a good person, never mind his disability.

This semester, though, I learned something new about my uncle. At the age of 16, his vision fading fast, my grandparents, his parents, spent thousands of dollars on telescopic glasses, hoping to buy him a little more time with his eyes. He took advantage of this and got his driver’s license. He never drove, but my grandfather made sure he had a car so that his friends could drive him around, even if they didn’t have a car themselves. What I learned, though, was that he still has a valid license. His oldest daughter, my cousin, is 15 and has a learner’s permit. The law states that anyone holding a learner’s permit must be supervised by a parent or guardian with a valid driver’s license in the front seat. My uncle, therefore, is technically able to do this, despite the fact that he can no longer read without extreme magnification.

When my grandmother told me this, she was so proud of him. She started crying thinking about how he’s held onto his driver’s license and his pride. At first, I was impressed too. But then I thought past his disability and thought that maybe, this was simply shockingly illegal. I am torn now between respecting him for being as normal as possible, and feeling appalled that he would be so irresponsible to consider himself adequate supervision for his daughter as she learns to drive.

Austism Speaks

"You Asked, She Answered: Carly Fleischmann, 13, Talks to Our Views About Autism." ABC News Online. .

      The original article, presenting Carly and describing her incredible breakthrough, offers a chance for readers to post questions to Carly and have her answer them. Some of the questions are a little trite, and the original article probably has better responses than the question and answer follow-up. Asked what she wants people who do not understand autism to know, Carly responds:
Autism is hard because you want to act one way, but you can't
always do that. It's sad that sometimes people don't know that
sometimes I can't stop myself and they get mad at me. If I could
tell people one thing about autism it would be that I don't want
to be this way. But I am, so don't be mad. Be understanding. (abcnews.com)

In Carly’s own words, we have an opportunity to learn what it is like to be trapped inside a mind that won’t let you speak. She urges other therapists, in her question and answer article, to be patient with their charges and continue to encourage them. One reader asked, “What one thing do you think my autistic child would want me to know about him?” Carly, tellingly, answered, “I think he would want you to know that he knows more than you think he does. He is lucky to have nice parents” (abcnews.com). The answers provided by Carly give hope, no doubt, to countless parents of autistic children who cannot speak.

This is obviously a very heart-warming and encouraging story for many people, especially those with children who have autism and cannot speak. The fact that Carly can now show exactly how much she does know, and how much she picks up on is something everyone can appreciate. She shows that being unable to talk does not equate being unable to comprehend. For doctors and therapists, this opens up a world of opportunity. As Carly’s father explains, even professionals had labeled Carly as “moderately to severely cognitively impaired” (abcnews.com).

Guilt

“In the Way.” Laura Hershey. 1992. www.cripcommentary.com

           The first three lines of the poem seem so normal for me. As a waitress, I have had to ask people to move often, and I would be hard pressed to say that I ever had to ask a wheelchair-using person to move; usually, it was just people with their chairs stuck way out in the aisle. Although I don’t know that I would have worded things exactly the way this waitress did, I understand the sentiment here. I have to side with the waitress, and that alienates me, as the able-bodied reader, from the poem in the very first stanza. To me, the whole idea of getting what one wants by aggravating and annoying others is wrong. Maybe it’s my upbringing, but I would prefer to get what I want by explaining and teaching, not being such a pain that people don’t have any choice but to give in. I feel guilty for this, but I don’t agree with the speaker. 

The part that bothers me most, however, is the penultimate stanza, where the speaker is intent on building walls between herself and the (I assume) able-bodied who wish to deprive her of her rights. I, rather naïvely, I guess, assumed that the point of disabilities activism was to tear down walls, not create them. But in this stanza, with her language, insisting that she can “turn back/ customers, employees, delivery people, even cops” she seems to want to make others feel shamed and disgraced, and like some super-hero corrupted, flaunt her power over others ( ). I suppose in the circumstances, many people would love the feeling of power. But loving something has never made it the wisest choice, and perhaps the speaker would benefit from some distance at this point.

Hershey makes some very valid points in her writing. There are many things that should be changed, including disability rights. But I think that she also fails to realize that anyone can be in the way, not just her. I’ve been asked to move countless times by wait staff, because I have a tendency to tip my chair back and stretch out my legs. That does not, however, mean that the wait staff had something against long-legged people. Good service requires being able to move around quickly, and having people in the aisle is not conducive to that. Hershey also seems to thrill at the idea of lording herself over formerly powerful people. I don’t know if she would take it to the extreme that Hop-Frog did in the Poe story by the same name, but her idea of making a wall out of her wheelchair, separating herself in an ivory (wheelchair accessible) tower is one that could possible do more harm than good, as far as her cause is concerned.

Half-Man, Half-Tree

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Artifact 1

“Doctors refuse mother’s request to remove disabled daughter’s womb ‘because of charity backlash’." The Daily Mail.

What is at stake here is a person’s right to choose, but in this case, the person cannot communicate what it is they choose. Like many in the disabled community, Katie Thorpe cannot express herself, and it is up to her caretaker, in this case, her mother Alison, to act on her behalf. However, charitable organizations, designed to represent the disabled, have stepped in and said that they better represent the wishes of the disabled. Personal rights should never be impeached, and an irreversible surgery to remove a woman’s womb would certainly be an impeachment of personal liberty, if, and only if, that person objected to the surgery. Is this a case of one person or one organization going too far? It would be easy to assume that Katie would not want to be subjected to the pain, discomfort, or humiliation of menstruation when her mother already must change Katie’s diapers (Katie is also incontinent). But what if some medical breakthrough is made in the next few years, while Katie is still of childbearing age? At this time, science is making leaps and bounds in progress, and a ‘cure’ for cerebral palsy could happen, even in the next twenty years or so. In that case, if Katie could be cured, the loss of her womb would be a devastating impeachment on her personal rights. However, if Katie is not cured, what then? Like many other disability rights issues, the choice of a patient who cannot communicate for herself cannot be properly understood. Then we must ask ourselves, who makes the final decision? Is it her mother, who raised her and takes care of her every day? Or the disability rights organizations, which know nothing of her personal life, but claim to know everything about her situation?