Being Fine, But Not Fine.

In all likelihood, I am fitter than you. I probably run, walk and cycle more than you do. I probably also spend far more time in hospital than you do. Most recently, I went for a run, then around 5km in, at a fairly speedy pace, my brain malfunctioned, and I had a fit, leaving me with a fractured skull and several stitches. Quite standard, for someone with epilepsy and the doctors and nurses, aware that I’d be used to this type of accident, acted as if it wasn’t a big deal.
Not so with others though. Most of my friends, who are also used to it, just said “Ouch – get well soon”. There’s always a slew of people who remark “You’re always ill/injured”, not as an observation, but more as a slight accusation. I’m treading carefully here, because it’s difficult to explain what’s bound up in this response. For many people, when thinking about disability, there seems to be a belief that disabled people are not healthy people and vice versa. That to be disabled is to be uniformly vulnerable. And whenever someone says “Oh for god’s sake, you’re always injuring yourself” I feel a) there’s an assertion that some part of it is my fault and b) they’re trying to decide whether I’m “healthy” or “vulnerable”.
From the outside, I doubt you could tell I’m disabled. I’ve got a full time job, and as I mentioned, I exercise all the time. I don’t need mobility aids, or any adjustments to my home or desk at work. I do however, have epilepsy, a progressive and hereditary arthritis of the spine and really complex migraines. But for the most part, this doesn’t alter my life that much. The occasional seizure is annoying, and can lead to a trip to A&E. My back does hurt, but exercise does wonders for the pain. And I’ve had migraines for so long, I can power through them. But I don’t “look” disabled. And people can struggle with that. Much of the discussion around reassessing people in receipt of Disability Living Allowance completely dismisses invisible disabilities as false. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen articles and heard conversations that suggest ME, PTSD, back problems and mental health conditions are “faked” by people “too lazy” to work. One commenter on Comment is free told how after a car crash left him with massively limited mobility he spent two weeks sat on the floor in his garden, working slowly, bit by bit on planting a flower bed. It took a huge amount of energy, and he was only able to plant one small bed, bit by bit. But he felt immensely satisfied when he’d finished. Then he was told one of his neighbours had seen him gardening and called the benefit fraud hotline.
The problem is, there aren’t clear and neat boxes in which to put “disabled” and “healthy” people. When I’m running 15km on a Sunday afternoon, I don’t feel disabled. When I’m on an ambulance stretcher being carted off to A&E, I might. But people struggle to accept that I can need a lot of medical treatment, but not need to be treated differently outside of the consultant’s room. And when people can’t fathom that there are spectrums of disability, that it’s often not a constant, it becomes easier to demonise benefit claimants. If you assume that some people see doctors more, not because they need to, but because they’re hypochondriacs or attention-seeking, it’s not difficult for the government to slash benefits from people who need them. And when you assume that disabled people are by definition weak and vulnerable, anyone who doesn’t fit that definition reinforces tabloid scare stories about the mythical mass of benefit-scrounging fake disability claimants.