March 2024

International wheelchair day is on the 1st of March every year and is a day to celebrate the difference that using wheelchairs has for the people that use them. I wanted to share with you all what wheelchairs mean to me. I’d like to know your experiences too.

I remember being young, perhaps seven and wondering why my friends were allowed to be in a powered wheelchair while I had to struggle in a manual one! At age 38 I still remember the reply,

“You don’t need one. We don’t want you getting lazy, do we?”

I remember being upset at the suggestion that I was lazy, and it’s still one of the things that rile me up today! Just because I need help, it does not make me lazy for wanting to make things easier. This brings me to my opinion that wheelchairs bring freedom, not laziness.

According to the charity Scope, there are 16 million disabled people in the UK. Not all disabled people need a wheelchair, but there are no statistics on how many wheelchair users there are. One of the main reasons for this is stigma. Natasha Lipman wrote,

“I didn’t feel ‘disabled enough’ to ‘deserve’ a wheelchair, based on the images of disability I grew up seeing. I firmly believed that I had to just ‘suck it up’ and keep pushing through.

This belief that if you’re in a wheelchair, you aren’t trying hard enough is common. In reality, wheelchairs enable people to mobilise, get out of the house and do things other than wash, dress and pee. My disability affects me to an extent where not being in a wheelchair is impossible regardless, why should things be difficult when they could be easier?

My first electric/powered wheelchair

When I was eleven and had my first powered wheelchair, I remember having a huge grin on my face and feeling relief. I was soon brought down to earth by whatever adult was with me that day, sharply saying,

“We’re only giving you this so you can get to class on time.”

Wheelchairs, be they the manual or powered variety, do not make people lazy; people’s attitudes do that. A wheelchair brings freedom, empowerment and more energy to get through the day. The stigma that using a wheelchair is giving up, taking the easy way out, etc needs changing. Being a wheelchair user doesn’t make life easy, but it does make it easier and there’s nothing wrong with that. This fact should be remembered not just on International Wheelchair Day but every day!