A Human Inventory

    Long before computers automated the inventory process of goods, a relative inventoried the goods of several grocery stores.  Many years hence, a more sophisticated world has demanded a more advanced inventorying.  Valuations are conducted by many professionals, who begin where the automated inventorying leaves off.  Valuations established a working value by which business, or the lives of divorced individuals may move forward to more profitable--more fulfilling--lives.
    I have known two professionals who engaged in inventorying and valuations.  I find myself in the midst of a different--very humbling--sort of valuation.  I am being called to itemize how I live my daily life.
    How do I live my life?  Can I 1. perform this activity independently; 2. Can I perform this activity with the use of equipment or adaptive devices; or is it true that  I cannot perform this activity.   
   Dress;  voluntary bladder and bowel control or ability to maintain a reasonable level of personal hygiene; toilet; feed yourself with food that has been prepared and made available to you; bathe (tub, shower, sponge); transfer from bed to chair.
   I feel comfortable with each today.  Yet, it is daunting to see those very real prospects as a part of my future is akin to the decision to get a power wheelchair--to opt to receive a head rim that I could use at the time in my future when my left hand might no longer be capable of manipulating a joystick.
     That is humbling, to say the least.
    You will go to college.  You will learn to live independently.
   I answer the questions with those words in my lifelong memory.  I have achieved the first.  I continue to achieve the second.  The future?
    I know how I have lived my life until now.  I have seen deterioration of my body in the last ten years, especially in the last two years.  But, the future.  Seeing its truth presented before me in black and white--starkly--that is humbling.
    So, how do I live in the present, such that I make the fullest use of my own abilities currently?  How do I live in the present, such that I do not endanger myself--my physical capacities--for the future?  How do I live in the present such that I position myself--prepare myself--for the future, with all of its humbling prospects?
    Responding to the current valuation, I thought that my visceral response to it was the section regarding activities of daily living--ADLs.  I am not partial to any acronym--clinical jargon--that abbreviates individual human beings.  To some, activities of daily living--ADLs--is a foreign word--an unknown quantity.  To others, it is a clinic scheme used to organize the occupational therapy needs of an individual.  Yet, to me activities of daily living--ADLs--represents a test that I can still pass independently, or with some equipment, or adaptive devices.
  These are humbling questions.
  Will there be a day when I cannot perform this activity--any of the activities of daily living? 
   Dress; voluntary bladder or bowel control or ability to maintain a reasonable level of personal hygiene; toilet; feed yourself with food that has been prepared and made available to you; bathe (bath, shower, or sponge); transfer from bed to chair.  These are tasks in a list--elements at the heart of dignity.

Crippled

     Nancy Mairs describes herself as crippled.  She is affected Multiple Sclerosis--significant aspects of her life.  Upon first reading her explanation regarding crippled, I cringed.  Childhood calls of "crippled" returned in an instant.  Mairs was clear.  She was not--she is not--prescribing the crippled label to all whose lives are in some way different from "normal,"  whatever "normal" is.
     I do not aspire to crippled certification, nor to being a cripple.  Yet, I respect her use of the label.  I understand the moment's hold it has on the body--on the mind.  Without aspiring to be crippled--to be a cripple--I must not run away, on my way to a different word, from the moment when crippled is the precise word that defines my moment's state.  Never did I imagine I would make such a statement about crippled, yet, it describes my current understanding.
    I am Patricia Ann Thorsen.  My family, my friends, and I call my self  "Patty."  Loss of stamina--loss of muscle tone--have brought me to stages I call physically challenged, and mobility impaired.  Yet, those terms do not encompass sufficiently the physical parts that are due to my cerebral palsy, and osteoarthritis.  I, like many people of a certain age, grew up as crippled, then handicapped, and then disabled.  I still describe the physical aspects, which have informed my spiritual self--my entire being--as disabled.  I do not mean to imply that disabled suffices to describe my entire being.
   I do need to be quite clear about my jigsaw puzzle pieces--crippled, handicapped, physically challenged, mobility impaired, and disabled.  Other jigsaw puzzle pieces well may enter my vocabulary--wheelchair user, wheelchair bound, confined to a wheelchair.  I do not think the latter two will define me, when I do get a wheelchair, and begin to use it.  Yet, in matter of fact, they will.   I pray that I will not run from the words before I become an intimate partner with my wheelchair--if she ever comes:)  This must be a journey, if I am not to fall victim to a wheelchair.
     I have no idea where this journey is headed--where I will travel.  Just as I had no idea of where I would arrive at the end of this posting, when I started writing it.