Life with Cerebral Palsy - Reflections on Easter
March is Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month 2018, so having CP I thought I'd write a short autobiography illuminating our differences, not the similarities which all too often we use to connote our equality with others in human existence. I make an acquaintance into a friend by sharing my immediate needs, which may involve them, for example, picking up a straw from the table and putting it into my drink, when I'd explain that the neurones from my brain down to my hands simply don't connect but go all over the place instead: “Sorry” I say. Sometimes this finds me a smile, but normally it places us on atheistic ground, which is my location of choice. Throughout this essay are disillusioned reflections on Easter, though not explicitly, which explain sometimes why things happen to dent ones identity. Where Jesus is alive today, rather, I think I am alive.
Disabled people don't exist freestanding, because along with a medical diagnosis comes people, health professionals and mobility experts, to heave you up, if that’s what it takes, from molecular combustion. A post-natal district nurse visited my mum and me quite unprofessionally for the third time just after I was diagnosed aged one and a half at the hospital as having CP. My childhood paediatric consultant diagnosed me with mild CP aged two and three quarters, and from then on as part of two school days a year he explained, perhaps badly, things to me at my October and April clinics, because it was a special school with a medical corridor. Occupational therapy, speech therapy, a very large physiotherapy room and a duty room of ten nurses which straddled three adjoining rooms. I was not a medical emergency, but there could be emergencies experienced by any one of us 165 kids, and a few died before leaving school. The motto was “Try, try and try again” to do the best you can, and so a major subliminal assumption which displaced me objectified once was that society, once we left school, passing into the state’s social and medical care provisions, would certainly continue but moreover, that they would build upon the care and expectations which had been set. Humans are multidimensional in abilities, needs and identity, each person being uniquely endowed.
My parents were born again Christians, both older back then, and my dad told me from age two that he knew by how he felt for one moment in his Spitfire that he'd won the war as a pilot fighting to reclaim occupied France. He worked out Germany’s strategy and confuted it, by arduously giving all. He told me to do sit-ups each day, his secret being Physical Training every morning, and that he'd abnormally used his leg strength in the cockpit when trying to suddenly turn his steering wheel so as to out fly the Messersmitz. I believed him, that he had won the war, and probably always will, but that what family is - believing because you know inside that things are true. But he didn't want to tell the public his story, just his friends and those he witnessed to, because god won the war, not Jim. He was a beautiful man and friend when he distanced himself from Fundamentalist bible texts, but an ogre when they directed his mind. I hated church where I'd sit and whisper to my atheist friend by lying about being physically able to whisper.
Otherwise I couldn't sit still due to the collision from god-concepts on my brain’s perceptions which gave the elixir of my forehead sweating in the pew due to my athetoid and ataxic movement, hypertonia and extensor spasm, but shortly the elders were winked at to forbid us to. I had then to avoid focal seizures which I was at risk of, having CP, and therefore to me the elders and church were medically abusive. As a teen, being the organist’s child, I was able to advise the ministers that if a disabled person blamelessly disturbs the congregation by making strange noises or having difficulty sitting and breathing, then the minister should drop a hymn book at the lecturn and then sing a hymn and the child should be removed from the service if they’re not like that normally in which case a doctor should be called in to assess the child for a childminder/carer who will care for them at home during church times.
I felt voiceless, but aged one I crawled into my father’s study to read many of his pharmaceutical books and dictionaries from his Heriot-Watt degree 1936-1947; his learning was interrupted by WW II. So I loved reading and Darwin’s Origin of Species was sixteen times but only three according to my parents who only allowed for intensive evangelical criticism, which was nevertheless necessary for my future life as, shock, the Scottish Joni Earekkson Tada, and even more shock, the modern Billy Graham. I refused to promote the Christian faith to disabled people and to the world, because I could not even flaunt it onto disabled people. I moved my arm and then my had intentionally as opposed to spasmodically by trashing god if that moment he was there in my mind, then possibly by turning my eyes to look at my arm, then by concentrating with all and every part of my mind on moving my arm in the way I wished it to go. It is not like this for me all the time, just sometimes when I need to move as I wish and can't do this subliminally. Neurological triumphs express the syntax of true human movement, cerebral palsy being a neurological disorder, and I can tell you now god does not exist or lurk for me on the motor cognitive level, but I appreciate having cerebral palsy very much just because I'm aware of bear patterns of reality and the laws of motion which bounce in semiology in the other realms: chemical; biological; in society as a social theory; the realm of place in the geographical. I know there's no god, and this is a positive because you can read academic literature rather than just have spiritual tracheotomies.
But I meant more to my dad than just his child, and if that's all I was and am then it's enough because he said upon me curing him from trauma pain in his hands that I could do what I wanted in life where the context was that he was about to bring me up in a Fundamentalist family. Whilst I was still a baby, I communicated by my eyes plus some vocalisations that my dad did not need to be in hand pain by resolving his psychological problems with god andWW II, Japan and the huns. He spent time holding me in my bedroom, because that was where I most liked, and it felt like mum was often unaware of us. But he began to suffer from hand pain, and one day he didn't want to pick me up. So I dismissed his attempts to and he did not. The next few days the same problem, and then the next day he didn't come in at all. I cried, and mum came in and waved her finger “Now Rhoda, if you’re crying because you just want to see your dad then you’re selfish.”
I was supposed to be attaching myself to her, being female, because misogyny is religiously right to some. I turned my head away and she left the room, so I decided aged one to counsel as I could my dad so as to stop his hand pain from flashbacks and memories of the war which came on suddenly but only in the evenings. He didn't want to approach a doctor because faith healing was his first stop. By my words and looks, I did put him out of pain, and he gave himself through his pharmacy a course of steroids enlarging his hands, but my achievement became subliminal in the family, downgrading me from my dad’s doc or psychologist only to his daughter, which sometimes is not much in mission-hall fundamentalism. Psychotic recognition occurred to both my mum and dad upon watching the film Oranges are Not the Only Fruit adapted from Jeanette Winterson’s book based on the Elim Pentecostal church, which my parents made sure I knew and loved. Aged 16 we had an African couple for Sunday lunch who worshipped at Elim, the husband being a PhD student of Economics at Edinburgh. My choirmaster dad knew all the evangelical and Fundamentalist churches in Edinburgh throughout all the different denominations so he would take the whole family to one of these churches just as a one-off interest one Sunday. We’d just worshipped at Elim six months before. I was given oranges whenever I was constipated.
Being like my dad, I liked sports and would walk up Arthur Seat, initially by taking my dad’s arm enabling us to climb this hill together, but he’d let me enjoy that rehabilitation potential which so identified me because although I was only born with mild CP, my parents made my independence training aged 3-6 in which I should’ve learnt to dress and feed myself and assist myself in the toilet into a religious relationship, very intense and emotional. My concentration should’ve been intense, but I couldn't get into this spot because my mother’s origami and neediness wouldn't allow me to. She was intensely needy, needy for me to accept Jesus as the friend who would help me control my spastic fingers to e.g. dress myself, and considering my dad’s high status within the family as the man who won the war, I knew where this was going - they’d bring me up to become a minister, perhaps worldwide, to disabled people, and to say that Jesus can help you move. So in the bathroom when she tried to train and encourage me to handle my own clothing, I was paralysed with fear and petrified. Out with my comfort zone, I just wanted my mid-teen life to start through a space-like transportation, magically. I was suicidal aged five being scared that social workers wouldn't understand my sociology but I spoke to my first nurse at school who was a graduate of medicine doing a lower paid job with the intention of rising up the medical structure. Independence training is just rehabilitation for kids, made accessible through relationship with the parent, but mine was inappropriate so I just wanted accessible independence training or, in other words, rehab from an atheist or non-religious occupational therapist which the school doctor gave me at university. I did become independent for ten days but my parents for the thousandth time traversed the motorway to knock me off normality - complete normality. Can't they leave happiness when they see it, even if it is without god? I knew normality from running faster than the professional athletes down Arthur Seat.
I was a gamer: arcade games where I put my gaming name RIM at the top of the board, very often; Atari, ZX Spectrum; BBC Acorn. I drew pencil drawings of plants and imagery portraits which James was spanks for when he kept pinning them onto his bedroom wall, because my CP was not apparent. I wrote poetry in my head being scared that my parents would wish to read them had them had they been written or typed, hence my mental health diagnosis in 2005 for something which only irritated born again people. I enjoyed wheelchair dancing on Monday evenings and went swimming on a Friday evening both at school.
Being normal sometimes because I always had the potential for OT and rehab for my hands, like running down Arthur Seat, I knew how to move so I loved playing snooker, only initially without the cue and using the back of my hand, I scored a 147 break about 50 times from 1977-1983, and I sensitively beat James at table tennis when this didn't upset him, because he had cystic fibrosis. I read many books behind my parents backs because any interest was potentially dangerous before conversion in that it was considered as a thief of Jesus’ place in my heart.
I became a Christian for two years aged ten, so I was free to read these books openly and do what I wanted, if Jesus helped me read. I rode a white and orange exercise bike everyday, but because my mind looked vacant sometimes when I wrote poetry in my head, thus implying to my parents that I had a mental health gene, they reprimanded me for lusciously enjoying my body and welcomed the flood which their ministers begged them to avoid of hatred towards bodily exegesis, or bodily enjoyment. One Sunday the minister said sandwiches were good, not fish and chips. Roman catholics preached mortification of the flesh, but my parents happily exchanged health and fitness for spiritual devotions fervently and were happy to admit this back then. But not to my physical therapists. I did yoga everyday and thought of the golden Buddha, knowing my parents wouldn’t even guess that I was capable of such an activity: sitting cross-legged for me was a physiotherapy exercise, but ten minutes like this everyday meant nothing and indeed replaced the nothingness of my perturbed mind, because I categorically couldn't be left to become too bored having been forbidden to play with my toys, read books and do anything apart from pray and read the bible on a Sunday until age ten, when I supposedly converted to Christianity. So many possibilities thereafter, until twelve. I also read the bible straight through secretly aged five, secretly because this was wrong. That was for ministers, and you had only to do an eight verse quiet time so that your ministers could direct you. Christians do a quiet time when they rise before breakfast and, often in bed, just before they sleep in which they read a small bible passage and pray for family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and any events in their lives. Trash.
I played with the birds, knew a fox and a bird helped me walk in the miniature forest area in our garden because my parents could not help my physically; we were distant but as long as I went to church and attended family prayer times then we were close. Society changes by interpretation with the production of goods and services as its anchor, so when they upgrade, change or are invented then understandings progress. My childhood society was rubbish, but pleasantness and happiness came with computer gaming which induced the technology age, an exquisitely fine dynamic. No other vehicle for expression and entertainment could enthuse another world better, because Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are perfect to me. Remember, Steve’s first job was as a programmer of arcade games and he wrote Pong, which took him into programming Atari games. So like my hero and idol Steve, I was a Buddhist, but I also espoused Christian atheism where Jesus was an Israeli man around 0-33CE such that Jesus as a deceased historical great exists but Jesus as god or as a god does not exist. But I was not a Buddhist because gamer-man Steve Jobs was, I practiced Buddhism at home simply through righteousness, simply because I believed in Buddhism on my own and from my own accord. This is what I told people, but they didn't realise the solidity of my claim and thought I was conceptually but not practically laity. Yoga meant everything to me, but my parents judged my emotional IQ towards doctors, nurses and therapists to be extremely low having rebelled against independence training. I had not questioned relational independence training, I had rebelled against religious independence training, which is extremely different.
Was this mistake understood by teachers and health professionals so that I could enter into a new, different, upwards moving life? My childhood life was not very good, only I was proud of what I'd done for my dad - cured his pain, which returned sometimes but I just talked to him again, convincing him he was not in his Spitfire and that the enemy was banished. This involved a full explanation of the transportation system in which I swore that you had to possess sanity to fly and show your passport, such that no e.g. German or Jap was going to come over and get him. I was loved by all my teachers, including technical studies and home economics, but they didn't seem to wish to discuss acquiring me a non-religious OT, which would involve removal from my family, because I could not use my hands to e.g. turn pages when my parents were watching or in my room. This was normal for someone who’s been abused in independence training, but the health professionals apart from the school doctor thought that this was a personality defect of mine.
Many people are involved in your life as a disabled person, all the more with the severity and complexity of your disability. I had a physio, OTs, speech therapists, a dentist, and carers at school, who preferred to stand up for the other pupil’s minds rather than mine when deliberating on who was right between myself and my parents regarding independence training, because it most certainly was a fiery independence training room which we’d occupied where arguments surfaced, not intimate exchanges and dialogues between a disabled child and their mum/dad. I hoped my GP would save me from being disabled and dependent on carers in life by relocating me in the UK whereby my parents wouldn't know my home address, but when I walked into his office the first time for him as a new doctor at our practice, my mum said “This is Rhoda. She’s severely disabled.” Mild CP means you can walk, severe CP means you can't walk, care for yourself possibly talk. She implied to Dr Ostrowski that there was something else going on like learning difficulties, a behavioural problem or a mental health problem, or else that he could take advantage of her suppression of me, because I most definitely evinced as mild CP having just walked into his office myself and sat down. I could use my hands for some things and I read paperbacks myself, organising my own folders but I just couldn't handle my own clothing or feed myself. It was mild CP indeed, simply because I could walk.
Today I get help with turning pages and folder organisation, but I feel secure in asking for this because had I asked my carers, who were my parents, then they would’ve intruded into and directed my mind and opinions. As an atheist kid in a Fundamentalist household you’re left with space, your own private room where you make yourself into the secularist you become, and I was determined to keep my mind. I achieved my grades myself whilst the OTs and medical staff assumed my parents helped me e.g. turn pages, so it transpired that gradually I succumbed at about the age of 14 to my hopeless situation and let my parents assist me sometimes to turn pages and order my files because the therapists at school assumed, just as my parents had told them, that I couldn't use my hands, without any clauses. The school doctor helped me to adjust to this enforcement of a higher level of care for studying and reading, because he tried unsuccessfully to change my mum’s need to care when there was ability, whilst helping me as much as he could to become the able-bodied, mild CP jiver of my birth. Over the years, from when I was very small, she progressively begged me to let her physically help me, or care assist me, with study and reading, very obviously because she desperately wanted to supervise my mind in terms of my life view; she wanted me to be born again Christian. But this contradicted health and wellbeing advice from the medical staff, so I felt physically and mentally rejected by my parents because my dad just followed my mum, letting her overrule decency and child dignity. He’d follow my mum, but not so much, because he’d either walk me from the tea table to my bedroom or lurk outside until I was ready to read, he’d open up the book at the page I said for me, go away then come in forty-five minutes later and feed me against my will a bar of chocolate, at the same time turning a page for me, but then he’d leave the room for me to turn the pages myself. It was like he was taking laughing my mum because upon leaving the room he had this massive big grin on his face. Mum would stay about to turn each page for me.
I was not like that, because I played sports like snooker, I studied and read myself, I could feed myself with James sometimes when we asked to eat separately and he just lied about it, and I gave myself the occasional cigarette, yes at that age…younger. It was just that my parents wouldn't allow the school to know that I was using my hands and so didn't have a psychological problem with movement or action in itself, just with certain activities like dressing whose semiotics had been religiously dressed by neurotic Christians. Could my GP interact with the medical staff and save me from a life of carers?
Sure enough, my new GP when I was aged 14 in 1986, who remained my GP until he was struck of the medical practitioner register in 2013, took the opportunity to steal more than £300000 from the NHS by claiming that his patients were on more drugs than he’d prescribed, because he wrote false prescriptions but didn't give them to the healthy patient. In around 2110 another GP for this practice visited me at her request and asked thrice if I was on an injection for cerebral palsy, each time I said “No”. I then knew the specific drug for which he’d claimed money for myself because I didn't need to wait until this abuse of care was made public. I knew for sure then that he was stealing. Why was this a disaster for me? Well, all the health professionals in your life can be advised by your GP, and since my world fixed me with two identities - one where I used my hands for some things and another where I couldn't use them at all, I wanted my superior identity, which was the one without Edinburgh University, to direct my healthcare and my health professionals decisions.
https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/health/edinburgh-doctor-accused-of-300-000-nhs-fraud-1-3049414
You see, there was this differentiation between my home care needs, how much my parents did for me, and the medical staffs conceptual model of my care requests to my parents, because my parents forbid me to tell them that I used a computer normally at home, both the Spectrum and the BBC Model B which I augmented with an overlay on the keyboard, a keyguard, because the OTs had made them aware that there might be some special technology for me coming up, which may involve Edinburgh University since my OTs and others thought I couldn't type on a keyboard. I hated this thought, and thought that my desire to be changed each morning at school into jeans from a dress or skirt that I didn't want was acceptable and would ensure me of a good future by stating my need for medical distance and health identity away from my parents and their church.
I looked happy in my family, and this image of contentment was important because back then in the 1970s and early ‘80s the winner between faith and science was faith because the analysis was impossible, so the medical staff and others presumed that I could not explain religion and Christianity by the god meme and by Jesus as a man but not as a god. My abstract situation could be exemplified by asking if I chose my own wardrobe, but this was a foul question at a special school where this was a basic right and dignity for all pupils, because some couldn't do many other things, so it lurked in the background. So the other pupils needed to know how this medical refuser weighed life up and being slightly whackers about my situation, they’d presumed that I was disabled that I just preferred to have carers than to help myself. So they approached me one playtime aged ten asking me if I identified myself as disabled. I didn't really answer them, but a year and a half later I had too many for my mum meltdowns that she allowed me to wear jeans with a jumper/rugby shirt. Mega! But then the others didn't really know how to approach me. Anyway, the school code was that if you could use your hands to do something then absolutely, you did that and had autonomy yourself in what that was. It was this question of autonomy which angered my parents, because upon independence, the first thing that I would do and did was go to the pub. I was often told by that they’d rather I was a disabled Christian than without carers, able-bodied and a non-Christian or atheist. That was their code, and it was their foundational code, so I opted to believe in the school code instead which the school doctor taught me rightly.
So aged ten Edinburgh University gave me two head switches to type with, which upset my essence, also being painstakingly slow, and so I complained to the school doctor and we agreed I'd try an expanded keyboard with my hands. This to me as well as him was a complete success, but everyone, medical staff, pupils, classmates and indeed my teacher was negative about it. My teacher on my first day of using it said “If you can't type on that without errors then you're not using it again”, but that was simply an unrealistic learning period. It was so much healthier and better to type with my hands than head that I felt invigorated by typing. Nobody really wanted to know me, the real me, because this would involved separation of my mum from me, which couldn't happen to church leaders. And my parents cared for my brother James who was dying of CF, so the medical staff by no means wanted to remove me from me family who’d be beside themselves, albeit essentially perhaps in an extremely platonic way. I had a gift for the articulation of atheism and wanted to write A Reply to Mere Christianity. The arguments raged and class-life became volatile, so I reverted back to using the two slow head switches. Desolation.
I therefore approached Edinburgh University about another system for typing, simply because I was in a closed box and terrified of this two switch system being classed as my system, the one for my disability, because I did not have one static disability because I when I concentrated on doing something, I could do it. Occasionally, aged 4-9 when we visited my maternal grandparents to a day trip on the border village of Stitchill, I'd be left to play either inside or outside, whatever I chose because I refused to join in with the god talk. I didn't like the religious images in the house and the close proximity of the family, so I’d go outside, concentrate and focus on the road ahead in order to walk to the neighbouring farm, unknown to anyone. I asked for a job saying that I was John Story’s granddaughter, but on the first day unpaid because I was disabled. I got the job and the farmer begged me to return the next day, but I explained we were just visiting my grandparents for the day. I returned on all future visits until the family sussed out that it was me who was making the farms so productive, which I'd done initially by hard manual labour and forthwith by my managerial skills, partly from my dad who had ever open ears for my advice about managing his pharmacy. My boss let me run across his fields to jump haystacks, after which the Olympics were mentioned the first time having dismissed the Paralympics, and I just thanked humankind that my dad, Jim Monihan the Spitfire pilot, was my dad because I knew I had his athletic, agile genes. But I believe it was me who asked for an 8-way footswich, and I believe I described it to them, technically, because I was a BBC programmer and had conquered Spectrum programming.
This is the footswitch. It is at the moment unique and the only one in the world, but my computer engineer is this month building me a new one which we hope to roll out for other disabled people, because it is fast. It's available as a handswitch as well, which most people will prefer, as a joystick which moves eight ways, and both are available for the iPad. I type and move the mouse using my left foot on a footswitch via a 2-digit code of numbers from 1 to 8. I'm the fastest footswitch user in the world according to Edinburgh University but all the others have no more than 4 switches when mine is 8-way. My posture greatly affects my speed, but OTs here don't seem to be interested because they've never offered me e.g. a postural assessment in which different wheelchairs are experimentally tried. Or even different chairs. Well, now that I've found my old posture myself I think life will be much better for me. Fast is at different speeds for different people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv4cuetR0VI
The two small interface boxes accept the code of numbers from my footswitch, then inputs them as ASCII codes of letters, numbers or punctuations into the computer which then types whatever I've typed or moused. It's a fantastic system for me, and I really appreciate using it to write poetry, essays, religious studies, graphic design, Pinterest, and I like blogging. Tech is tailored, not just universal, because everyone has the entitlement to enjoy a digital space. Thumbs up to Paul Nisbet, the engineer! It gives a new meaning to the book of Revelation in the bible which has lots of some would say very meaningful numbers for today's church, such as 7, 10, 12 and 666 along with 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, when these numbers pertain to the ancient Judean and Roman culture.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129191863171/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129191863140/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129191863174/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129191863112/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129191863102/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129191872854/
My footswitch caused madness and a small amount of anger in the Christians of my parents mission hall/church when I was a child and teen, but I was grateful for the differentiation away from then, because after they saw it I was well and truly "lost", hell bound, or bound for the Magna Carta! (was even called the beast). It's sad that society's not progressive to some people, just god, because it's people who make society.
Here’s some of the codes for my footswitch:
22 a 35 b 33 c 34 d 21 e
43 f 62 g 42 h 41 I 36 j
17 k 51 l 25 m 23 n 31 o
52 p 27 qu 24 r 32 s 12 t
15 u 26 v 16 w 64 x 44 y 67 z
13 - 1 (code 13 was number 1, 13 typed a 1)
71 - 2 74 - 3 55 - 4 37 - 6
72 - 7 65 - 8 56 - 9 47 - 0
54 - . (code 54 was a full stop, 54 typed a .)
53 - , 63 - - (code 63 was a dash, 63 typed a -)
66 - = 76 - ‘
…and so on. You could obviously type capitals, letters, numbers, punctuation marks or whatever, and the return key was code 61.
All was well if my social worker got my needs right for my university life, but she asked my mum what they were, so controversy arose and I submerged under cold ice. My mum stated different needs to me for my university life, but she was respected and I had to suffer. So I just did the best job of that mistake that I could.
My dad bought me an electric wheelchair aged 11, and I would go out for walks in my neighbourhood alone because James my late brother of cystic fibrosis was too sick to join me. This I think is the real story of me going out alone in these future years: to buy things at the shops and supermarkets, to the cinema, to pubs, to parks. I would just ask any fellow customer to help me get things off the shelves, and they'd place the items in my shopping basket, after which I'd politely but not verbosely ask the till assistants to retrieve my wallet from my bag, show me the money, pack my bag and then return my wallet to my bag. I didn't like my religious parents caring for me and much preferred the public: it was an atheistic act of defiance. However, my last care agency called it "wandering" and certified me for it, but I couldn't get ILF money to be accompanied out by a carer because I wouldn't promise my parents that I wouldn't go to the pub or cinema and rather that I would go to church. I was independent outside like this until the age 32 when I 'acquired a Community Psychiatric Nurse’. Good grief!
Anyway, what was any member of the public to think of me? how were they to react to my requests for help??? I see my rather outgoing behaviour as potentially inappropriate, but what was I to do without the ILF? Stay in all day everyday? Sometimes I did explain to them why, that my parents wouldn't let me have carers for going out 'cos I'd go to the pub, just to those who befriended me by helping me repeatedly, until they knew exactly what I wanted and understood my speech.
I owe this independent life outside to Stephen Hawking, because I bet he popped into people's minds when I newly approached them for assistance. He means disabled people are sane, can ask the public for help, and have good perceptions. Finding this man amazing, brilliant and ingenious from A Brief History of Time which I read in 1988, I need to thank Stephen Hawking for being an enabler for me to go out over all these years, and after I explained to certain members of the public about the ILF ban, I would end with "I believe in Stephen Hawking" or "I love Stephen Hawking", and they'd click and understand things better: religion.
Good rest, Prof Hawking. You will be remembered long after we've discovered human flight, for millenniums to come. Einstein Hawking. Thank you for teaching me about physics, and thank you for taking me out everyday from most of my life so far. You're special to me and have given me relativity to my community. Love to your memory.
I just want to say now thank you to every member of the public, shop assistant, students, bus driver (one day my jacket fell off the back of my wheelchair when I was about to board and the driver got up and put it back on my handle bars) and taxi drivers who assisted me when I used to go out myself with products and my wallet, and even to cinema goers who gave me a drink or crisps. You did not need to do this, and you did it for the love of other people. I really appreciate it, and it was something which kept my sanity and my mind whole, making me feel completely loved when I had no one to love me. Cheers. Thank you to the students of Tile Hill College Coventry and of Glasgow University (and twice I drank at Strathclyde Students Union) who never said no, ever, doing everything for me with a smile or without being fazed. I owe my marks and degree to you, and we must commend ourselves for what we've done.
So self-travel and public care was fine for me because it was fine with my public - I never forced anyone to assist me, and I thanked everyone. Many thanks to Lothian Buses who allowed me to board buses without a bus pass and without paying, because without this special right I could never have gone out so much on my own - taxis are too expensive to use everyday. I vaguely remember going into their office/shop near Princess Street and explaining the situation, but I also remember once, when I moved flat, at the point after you board when you pay or show, the driver simply radioed his boss and asked if it was ok to take me. He said yes, so I think Lothian Buses are mega! Just like the Lothian bus driver who avoided a car on the icy road in that period of snow and blizzards.
Today I have ILF care and thoroughly enjoy having a carer or PA accompany me outside. I've fought for it. But those who assisted me when I was alone before still smile at me and chat to me because they know that they matter to me as well. Greatly. I'm back to pursuing my ambitions which were stopped for some years by a bad GP, because they can change your life.
Since 2015 I have 750+ poems online on PoetrySoup.com and you can Google each of these poems separately. In February 2016 an anthology Filling The Void: A Selection of Humanist and Atheist Poems was published containing three of my poems, which can be found on Amazon, Kindle, and in paperback in America. At the beginning of 2016 I took an online poetry course with the Online Poetry School on Poetry and Autobiography. In June 2017 I gained the MOOC Philosophy, Science and Religion: Science and Philosophy from Edinburgh University (bite my lip), scoring 100%, and in July 2017 I gained another MOOC - Foundations of Assisting in Home Care, from the State University of New York, again scoring 100% In 2017 I began a long distance course with Aberdeen University doing a Certificate of Christian Studies with modules: Exploding the New Testament; Theology From Jesus to Calvin: the History of Christian Thought; Buddhism.
In December 2016 I wrote a 101 page social care report, Report on Care Agency X, which is an interpreted review of the care I received from a certain care agency for 17 years, 2001-2017, which I did not like and which often failed to meet my needs. Between March and August 2016 I wrote my 261 page autobiography, but this is unpublished by preference. Over 2016/2017 I wrote three long online essays: Why is Creationism Wrong - A Strong Reply to Creationists; A Refutal of the Existence of God - the Invisible Dark Pink Balloon Theory; My Christmas Story - Mary and Joseph. And in May 2017 I wrote I've Just Walked Again After 10 Years having been refused my terms for a rehab stay by two consultants which banned visits from my parents and their Christian friends thus during who twice daily prayed openly in my ward with me for my physical betterment having been knocked of my stride them, by my parents, through a stroke, because they'd insisted I ate very large portions for no reason over a sustained period of about a year and a half: I was becoming happy in my secularist choice of interests and was initially buying pescatarian which they quickly contradicted as my personal choice by telling the carers that this was truly what I liked. Why can't people understand that certain disabled people wish to leave home mainly to become veggie or pescatarian? I'm not guilty of requesting help as a school leaver from a social worker for this dietary transition, which my allocated social workers claimed derided my parents as abusive, but yes, mine were. You should not equate all vulnerable disabled kids with personal choice in clothes, music, friends, films, books, opinions and food, because some of us don't know this freedom, have never had it, need it more than can be understood, and hence strive everyday with everything that they have to create their own happiness. Ramped access into buildings is more than secondary for me.
I have a degree from Glasgow University 1995 in Computing Science and Management Studies minoring in Economics and Social Policy. Honours subjects were Images of Marketing, Organisations as Human Systems and Management Information System. And from 1990 I have the Venture Scouts Explorer Belt Award for camping in the Canadian Rockies and for researching, understanding and meeting Cree Indians in Calgary. I enjoy reading, films, music and graphical design, I go to the gym, and I do 150 sit-ups each day (sometimes 100 but other times 300) and ride a sitting exercise bike each evening when I do 3000 revs.
I am vibrant about people centred philosophies for businesses and organisations, being a strong humanist, but am simultaneously enthusiastic about goal-oriented management in which the employees are asked about their work goals and are encouraged to have goals. By my poetry I hope to impress upon people the need to be aware that science answers questions which religion combusts, ignores or creates, and that all people are of an inherent equal worth. My poems discuss science, technology, politics, history, religion, atheism, disability and films, and I believe in evolution.
I find it hard to be assisted by carers, doctors, psychiatrists, OTs and other health professionals who don’t know - yes - don't know, that as a kid I’ve out run adult athletes down Arthur Seat, jumped haystacks and scored snooker breaks of 147 many times. In previous lives. I wanted this to connote mental wellbeing for me, but health professionals accepted my parents definitions which saw me quite badly disabled and dependent on carers just because I objected and object to Jesus being constantly mentioned in my statutory rehab as a kid, or independence training. I had such a mouth to my parents that it shut me up as well, making me quieter though not quiet in life. I didn’t argue as a disabled child would with their parents, in a protective environment, because my intellect loosed all the whips of reprimand from a human hell upon two born again church leaders who really didn't want to know they were in the wrong.
My sectioning in 2005 was wrong because my parents defined me as unwell to the psychiatrists when I was not according to me and to non-religious people, and they told them I was severely disabled implying that I was born like that such that my psychiatrists couldn't lock in with me emotions against my parents, situation and therefore forthwith deteriorated disability. Your GP must be your GP, because your health professionals should endeavour to help you in distinction from those around you, whether or not your parents are ministers. My dad was Billy Graham’s choirmaster in Mission Scotland 1991 having many Edinburgh choirs, and my mum was a youth organiser/minister for an Edinburgh bible college.
It's not my fault if I have a speech problem, but rather I think I should be mandatorily offered assistance to speak to health professionals upon making appointments, from their term. If we don't address this problem of access to healthcare for people with communication problems then our society won’t be universally caring where it matters, which is on the GP/healthcare level. Care assistance can't be non-affecting and harmless because the abstraction validated by the GP and thus the health professional formulates the disabled person’s or patient’s everyday life who have the absolute right to get there before their relatives. It is exactly this right that my social worker in 1989 said “No” to, telling me that this rather was a mental disorder of mine. So I insist that Care Plans should list your past abilities and perhaps disabilities because your expectations bud from them and it is from these that your wellbeing sources its definition.
Disability campaigners can't define normality for the disabled person themselves because normality is different for everyone being derived from your past history, which changes the present context. I have my own future ambitions for an OT who accepts my screed, one who’ll give me access to my fabric, and thus my disabled identity and care description, because no, I certainly don't have it at the moment notwithstanding the strides of success I've won. Medical records and professionals ignite the spirit of the individual, because there is no remoteness if these two beauties synthesise in majestic coalescence to cause the dumb to speak and the disabled to run. Today, I am scared to have the more than buried conversation with my mum regarding my original diagnosis - mild CP, because she’s fabricated this determinedly into severe CP with a psychosis in my life through the health profession. But the Data Protection Act 1998 endows patient with the right to read and augment their medical records held by their GPs at anytime, and they can have a copy to take home for £50. I will pay that £50 which will be as nothing to me because I believe I will see my original diagnosis aged two of mild CP, although I am very perturbed that your present GP can remove unhelpful content which they feel will distress your mental health; I want to know the whole shebang, not just the placated prescriptions and non-controversial therapies. I would very much like to chat to my GP sanely, and perhaps see a neurological consultant again. The GP is the centre of your healthcare network which unites all your health professionals with each other, individually, in groups or possibly all of them together in one connected email or in one room. I’ve only ever wished, fundamentally in respect to my personal happiness, to have a GP who is my own GP, functioning, which means prescribing, out with my family unit, it's structure, because they took the wrong turn regarding the benefits of medical science, my parents being faith healers, and James’s faith healing service is described in a book they had published about his faith after he died. I succeeded three years ago with the installation of the Care Act 2014 in having an appointment myself, on my own and without my mum, with my GP, and I've never let her back in the door which society hadn’t realised was making me feel ice cold.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/24629129197300719/
I believe that the government have got my social care wrong, and just want to say that it's important to get care assistance right. It propels you into who you want to be by letting you do what you want to do and just because your mum says to social workers that it's not right for you to go to the pub then this doesn't mean that she’s representing your true wellbeing. I'm not a psychiatric case and should never have been classified as such, even and especially if my problem involved religion. Your GP matters to you. Religious problems should be respected rigorously as conflicts, not psychiatric definitions for the kids. I was not born happy sociology because I was born into religion, and so my vulnerability is to religious people and is obvious to secularists.
I believe in people because I am a humanist. Humanism makes a difference for me with atheism being just the explanation, and atheism is a negative statement but I'm sorry about this but it did indeed began as a renunciation of god who is an imaginary proposal or delusion, rather than as a new finding, discovery or positive proposition in itself. I hope that you understand cerebral palsy better now that you have read this because having the condition means lots of people in your life and lots of professional relationships, if need be. Even for kids with mild CP who succeed at dressing and independence when you're supposed to, as toddlers until aged 4, because you're then given the support you need because you don't need it thereafter.
I’m still trying to create basic medical happiness for myself, and I just wanted to give praise and honour to GPs, showing you their reach, because they help you achieve your ambitions and goals. Or they should. Most definitely, and this essay perhaps proposes change, calling possibly for a law against the faith healing of kids, because I was ordered to lie about mine, five times over.
Anyway, I hope I have illumined you about living with cerebral palsy because I know that I have not illumined god who does not exist, having inquired and faced the void of no carer sometimes. It's family feuds and liberations which need either processed or emulated by social workers and other health professionals, not whether you're sane enough to have a carer or see a doctor, or on the right wavelength. There is not disability identity, because you're needs may not be evident. My life history engrained in my joints being innate to me and can't be represented. Just said by myself, in my own way. This should be understood by all so that it can be reflected in social care structures. That would make truth real dynamically, for me as someone with CP from birth. The birth of a divine baby, or rather, a sensitive baby.
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