Posts by jeneration
Bound? Confined? Hardly.
It’s not uncommon for the media – print, online and broadcast – to refer to someone who uses a wheelchair as “wheelchair-bound” or “confined to a wheelchair.” I hate to burst their pity or sympathy-evoking bubbles, but I’m not “bound” or “confined” to my wheelchair. No one is. Webster’s Dictionary offers the following definition of the word, “bound”: “something that limits or restrains.” I think many people who use wheelchairs would not say they are limited or restrained by their wheelchair. If anything it’s the opposite. Their wheelchair makes it possible for them to move around and do things, and without their wheelchair they would actually be limited or...
Read MorePunch-In.org
Thank you to Adrienne Kleinmann of Punch-In.org for recently featuring me in a Career Profile! You can see it here. Punch-In.org is a project of the Great Lakes ADA Center. Great Lakes ADA Center’s mission is to increase awareness and knowledge with the ultimate goal of achieving voluntary compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Great Lakes ADA Center is a member of the ADA National Network which is comprised of 10 regional centers funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), a division of the U.S. Department of...
Read MoreDefining quality of life
Defining the Quality of Life By Jen Onsum People living with disabilities strive for acceptance and inclusion in this world that wasn’t necessarily designed for us. But, above all, we strive to have people see us as being no different than someone who lives without a mobility device and without being hooked up to medical equipment that saves lives. So when CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen deemed a little girl’s life with an “incurable disease” and potential life dependent on a ventilator and other medical equipment to be a “terrible quality of life,” (Cohen, Elizabeth, “Heaven over hospital: 5-year-old changes the conversation about death,” 11/04/15) it...
Read MoreDear Julianna
This is an open letter to the little girl from CNN who her parents say has chosen going to Heaven over the hospital the next time she gets sick. The article is available at: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/27/health/girl-chooses-heaven-over-hospital-part-2/index.html?sr=fbCNN102715girl-chooses-heaven-over-hospital-part-20342PMStoryLink&linkId=18289967 Dear Julianna, You are beautiful, sweet, funny, witty and a little sarcastic. A lot like me. Also like me you have a form of muscular dystrophy. And also like me, you’re experiencing some of the sometimes not-so-fun things that your disability causes like weakness and having to wear your BiPap A LOT and doing respiratory...
Read MoreFlying with Power
Hello everyone! I’m long overdue for getting this blog going. I guess I was waiting for just the right topic to kickoff things with. Sometimes I might write about accessibility and disability related topics, and other times I might write about business-related topics. For this first blog I decided to write about my favorite thing to do – travel – and more specifically, flying with a power chair. I recently went on vacation (a cruise, which I’ll likely blog about soon) and received numerous questions about flying with a power chair and physical limitations. I’ll start by addressing the first general question I tend to get asked – is it easy? No, it’s not. Being...
Read More
Recent Comments