Nancy Mairs On Being A Cripple Summary

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Nancy Mairs’ “On Being a Cripple” is centered around a teacher/writer with a psychocentric personality that chooses the synonym cripple as the way to define her chronic degenerative disease called multiple sclerosis. Also she takes you on her personal life journey, which is plagued with challenges, depression, realizations, joy, hatred and acceptance of the disease. Mairs’ hates the way society views physical appearance and abnormality. Mairs’ has a distinctive concern about the language used in regards to this disease. She doesn’t like the word disabled, handicapped or differently abled because these euphemisms cause people to view her as something that she isn’t. Mairs’ states that “society is no readier to accept crippled-ness than to accept …show more content…

She was not good at sports, but like to climb, skate and ride her bicycle and sail. She hated sports due to humiliation with field hockey and basketball. The initial symptoms began when she was twenty-eight years old and she started to rip and drop things. A neurologist was contacted and determined that it was a brain tumor. A year in a half later, she developed a blurred spot in one eye. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis is a chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system, in which the myelin that covers the nerves is somehow eaten away and scar tissue for multiple sclerosis in its place, interrupting the nerve’s signals. This disease has an unpredictable and uncontrollable course which leads to the loss of vision, hearing, speech, the ability to walk, control of bladder and bowels, sensitivity to touch, vibration and pain, potency and coordination of movements. The list of possibilities is lengthy and horrifying. Ten years from her initial diagnosis, she sustains some losses. She has sudden attacks called exacerbations followed by remissions. Her left leg is weak and she walks with the help of a brace and cane. She now uses an electric wheelchair. She no longer has much use of her left hand and her right side is getting weak also. There are some harsh realities that Mairs’ has to face regarding this

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