24 Hours
24 Hours Without A Disability
A day of better balance and moving quicker!
Disabled has been a label attached to me my entire life. I was born 12 weeks prematurely and as a result, suffer from cerebral palsy. A lot of my writing here on Medium focuses on my experience living with this condition.
I’ve always said whilst my disability doesn’t define me, the experience of living with it has certainly shaped the person I am today, and for that reason if I was told I could change one thing about myself, I would not take the condition away.
However, after finding the 24 hours publication, I pondered on what I would do if for just one day I lived without the chronic condition that has been with me for thirty years.
The first thing, which may not appear an obvious choice, is I would donate blood. As a premature baby, I received numerous blood transfusions during the first few days of my life that ultimately contributed to me being able to sit here and type these words you are reading.
Unfortunately, the rules around giving blood here in the UK state that if you have been given a blood transfusion from 1980 onwards, your blood is not eligible to be donated. Given that I was born in 1991, I fall into this category. It’s something I’ve always felt a little sad about and in a way guilty that I am unable to give back to a service that I benefited from so much.
Next, I would learn to ride a bicycle. My balance is very poor and as such, riding a bike is somewhat impossible for me to do. I had a large tricycle when i was around age nine, it was red and yellow and I absolutely loved it, I used to ride it up and down the street, I lived on joining in with the other kids out on their bikes. Sadly, I outgrew it by the time I hit my teenage years and there wasn’t really a market for adult-sized trikes at that time — not sure if there is now!
Not being able to ride a bike somewhat excluded me from certain situations growing up. I remember at school, groups of my friends would plan to meet up and go off on a ride somewhere. I was invited, but obviously, without the ability to ride a bike, I would have been somewhat left behind.
I used to attend an acting class on the weekends around that time also. I remember an occasion where a group of university students came and observed us with the view of casting some of us in a short film they were producing. I and three other boys were asked to attend an audition. Whilst at the audition, it became apparent that a requirement for the role was that all of the kids in the film rode bikes. I of course raised the issue of not being able to, and alas, I was not chosen to partake in the production with the other three boys from my class.
I’m not gonna sit here and say had I been able to ride a bike I’d now be an Oscar-nominated Hollywood star! But, that incident certainly knocked my confidence and I never expressed an interest in auditioning for anything again.
To cap off the day, I’d go for a really long run. It’s probably no surprise that running or ‘moving quickly’ in general is not a specialist subject of mine usually!
I detested physical education classes in school, especially sports day (which I called in sick for the last 3 years of school) and something called the bleep test. The bleep test we usually did once every school year and it involved you starting at one end of gym hearing a bleep played via a CD and having to make it to the opposite side before hearing a second bleep. The gaps in between these would get shorter and the aim was to be the ‘last person standing’. Normally I’d be eliminated by the time the third set of bleeps showed up and would be directed towards what I called ‘The bench of Shame’ to wait for my classmates to be eliminated and join me!
If time travel is allowed in this 24-hour experiment I’d go back to school able-bodied and smash the shit out of that bleep test and win the sports day 100m race whilst I was there for good measure!
Two-thirds of a triathlon and a blood donation might not be the most thrilling 24 hours ever written about. But the opportunity to be able to experience three pretty basic things that I’m currently unable to do would be a very successful day for me.
