During a prolonged medical leave from college, I had to come to terms with the permanence of my disability. But improvement has many faces.
Did you know that it hurts to walk with a cane?
It starts with a burning pain in your upper arm. Your muscles are being used in a way they’ve never been used before, your weight perched precariously at an angle previously unknown to your body. Then your joints start to complain about the somewhat unnatural movement, repetitive, day in and day out. Your other shoulder will start to hurt sometimes, too, now that you’re carrying all of your earthly possessions with your non-cane arm. I developed a neuroma in my foot after limping to the right for five years.
No one warned me about any of this. There were no instructions for use the first time I bought a cane, no strengthening exercises on the label. Not one of the dozens of doctors I saw during my ten-year diagnosis experience mentioned the potential side effects of cane use. I learned all this myself when I was on medical leave from my college for the first time.
You see, the thing about chronic illness is that they call it an “illness”. When I applied to colleges as a senior in high school, I did not lie. I told interviewers that I was “sick”. Which was true. But the implication of “sick” is that one day you will get better. And I…
