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Individuals who have found ways to adapt.. 12/22/2006 2:06:14 AM
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Three individuals who have found ways to adapt:
Dec 4, 2006 By: Danielle Milley
DURHAM — Joyce Lange is smart, attractive and funny. She has a good job, does volunteer work and has a family. Ms. Lange also happens to be deaf.
Druce Ayres is articulate, intelligent, and honest. He is an active volunteer, a family man and enjoys speaking his mind. Mr. Ayres uses a wheelchair to get around after suffering a stroke 22 years ago.
Dawn McKinson is an active person who is used to taking care of others — through her job as a personal support worker and as a mother to two children. At the beginning of June after a stroke, she had to get used to others taking care of her.
These are three examples of people not only living with, but thriving with, a disability. According to 2001 data collected by Statistics Canada, one in eight Canadians has a disability — that’s 12 per cent of the population — a number that is sure to rise as the population ages.
For adults between 45 and 64 the disability rate is nearly 17 per cent and of those Canadians 75 and older 53 per cent have some limitation in their everyday activities because of physical, psychological or health conditions.
With numbers such as these, legislation such as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 and municipal accessibility advisory committees are going to be vital for change, education and awareness.
Ms. Lange said there have been many changes made during the past 50 years in Canada when it comes to access for people who are deaf. The Whitby resident was born hard of hearing and by the time she started school she was deaf; most of her family is also deaf so the issue of accessibility was one often discussed at home.
She remembers at holiday gatherings the adults would sit around the table discussing issues, talking about what they should have, items such as visual fire alarms, a flashing light when the doorbell went off, and access to a telephone service. This was the 1950s.
“As I grew up I started to see these things come full circle and see the dreams of my family come to fruition,” she said.
While at an open house to conclude Hearing Week at the Canadian Hearing Society’s Durham office in May, Ms. Lange recounted how her family was fortunate enough to have an early model teletype machine (TTY) that was the size of a desk and that shook the whole house when in use, but she said, “we were absolutely thrilled to have it.”
There have been many developments over the years that have made the world more accessible for people who are deaf, deafened and hard of hearing, including closed captioning on TV, which became common in the 1970s, and the Toronto Transit Commission and GO stations having lights to show when the doors are closing on trains.
“So many little things are popping up when you least expect it,” Ms. Lange said.
She, and others, contends there are still changes to be made before Durham and Ontario are universally accessible. Changes need to be made when it comes to employment and with the building code, for example, they say. Ms. McKinson doesn’t have the history of living with a disability, but for the Pickering resident the challenge comes in trying to adjust her own life after her stroke. Her disability isn’t permanent though, as two weeks after her stroke she could speak clearly and was even walking.
As a personal support worker, Ms. McKinson has seen how frustrated some people can get at not being able to take care of themselves or communicate as clearly as they used to. She didn’t think she’d need help taking care of herself at just 42 years of age.
Just two weeks after her stroke, Ms. McKinson said it is challenging.
“I want to just jump up,” she said. “I’m an active person, I want to get up and move.”
While Ms. McKinson thought adjusting to not being able to fully use her left side would be mentally and emotionally challenging, it hasn’t been as difficult as she anticipated. She attributes this to the support of her family.
“It’s a bit of a challenge, you just find a new way to cope,” she said.
She knew when she headed home she’d have to have grab bars and a shower seat installed in the bathroom and she wasn’t sure how she would handle the stairs. Ms. McKinson, however, will one day be able to walk and have full mobility again. Mr. Ayres suffered a different kind of stroke and while he may now be able to drive and do things doctors initially told him he wouldn’t, his life changed forever in 1984. On Dec. 6 of that year, Mr. Ayres went to get ready for work, but instead he fell on his face. He had suffered a brain stem stoke, “which pretty much struck everything from my neck down... It was a very stressful and traumatic event.”
He was just 39 when he was told he wouldn’t be able to walk or drive again and that his cognitive abilities had been impaired.
Today he is an active volunteer, serving on the Ajax Accessibility Advisory Committee and the GO Transit External Advisory Committee, and drives himself around in a specialized van.
Mr. Ayres takes a pragmatic approach to accessibility. While he believes people with disabilities deserve the same rights as people without, when it comes to making businesses accessible he believes money is a factor, both in terms of the burden placed on the business and the ability of people to send a message by shopping or eating at places that are accessible.
In his own home, Mr. Ayres and his wife had to made decisions about accessibility. They decided to stay in their two-storey Ajax home and for years he slept downstairs, but later when he was stronger he began crawling up his stairs.
He said installing a lift would have made it difficult for his wife and two children, who are now grown and no longer live at home, to get up the stairs.
The family went through changes and a range of emotions after his stroke, but they adjusted their lives to make the best of it.
“I couldn’t change this, it was an action of life... It wasn’t anybody’s fault, I got handed a bad deal,” he said. These stories represent three of the many different kinds of disabilities people can experience, ranging from conditions people are born with to ones they develop later on in life that can be temporary or permanent.
There are several types of disabilities and functional limitations: physical, which includes minor difficulties moving a part of the body, muscle weakness or paralysis of one or more parts of the body; sensory, which includes not only hearing and vision, but also speech, smell, touch, and taste; cognitive, which includes intellectual, mental health and learning; and other disabilities that result from accidents, illnesses or diseases such as diabetes, cancer, or stroke.
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