Author Gary Presley has been riding in a wheelchair since he got polio 50 years ago, and says he has nothing to complain about. Writing in the Washington Post, he says he plans to “dance through life until hell freezes over.” An excerpt:

… like other people who have evolved from being “an invalid confined to a wheelchair” to a man advocating for such important issues as MiCASSA (the Medicaid Community-Based Attendant Services and Supports Act), as I have done for the past 10 years, I cannot forget that people with disabilities are among the last awaiting full integration into society.

I am one of a group once segregated by circumstance. That’s the significance of my story: that people with disabilities have made great progress in the last generation, and even though there’s much left to do, especially in the realm of employment, things continue to change for the better.

Gary Presley is the author of “Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio” (University of Iowa Press).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Medicaid/Medicare, advocacy, books, employment/jobs, first-person, wheelchair. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.