Relative Ability

Of all the challenges in this past many years the biggest challenge may have been giving my first bed bath………and it was to a man ~ not elderly and not really even old. I think he was in his thirties and I was only eighteen. He was also about six feet tall, black shaggy hair and just a big guy. This first nursing experience was in the DVA wing (Department of Veterans Affairs) in the Regina General Hospital in 1966.

Actually I was confronted with two huge challenges that day
The Bedbath or
Telling my dad that I wanted to leave nursing.

I wanted to run away that day, but I only made it as far as the linen closet. In that linen closet, with the smell of clean pressed sheets, I stood frozen and crying. Afraid to go forward and afraid to go back home. The sheets, pressed and folded back then, were no help at all. Or maybe they were. When I picked up the towels, bedsheets and other linen for the gigantic task ahead of me, they were comforting. Something my hands could control and work with while my heart and mind were reeling.

The big scary guy I had to bathe, turned out to be very kind and he was also paralyzed. Vulnerable and probably more scared about his life that I was about that one bath. Almost five decades later, I am still nursing. I wonder where he is now, each day filled with challenges. In the nineteen-sixties, a disabled person had little in the future but bed and wheelchair, limited access to all plays, theatre and entertainment ~ or grocery stores, housing……. Many of these issues have been addressed but there is more to life than having a roof over your head and being entertained.

Enter the Paralympic Games. Although the first competition for wheelchair athletes, named the Stoke Mandeville Games, was in 1948, the first Paralympic Games were held in Italy in 1960. (Information compliments of Wikipedia.) These games were arranged for the many veterans that had returned injured from wars. Little has changed in that regard. But the Paralympic Games are growing and the abilities of those with ‘disabilities’ are growing as well.

“I do not have a disability, I have a gift! Others may see it 

as a disability, but I see it as a challenge. This challenge 

is a gift because I have to become stronger to get around it, 

and smarter to figure out how to use it; others should be so lucky.”

~ Shane E. Bryan