Charlie Haden Quotes

When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.

I was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio.

My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea.

I had polio when I was 13. I started feeling stiff, my joints ached, and over a two-week period I lost my coordination and 20 pounds.

The difference is that with Ebola, it is such a devastating disease, and there is still no cure. They're still working on vaccines. The fact of the matter with polio, there is a cure; there is a vaccine.

I had to teach myself how to walk again. It was crazy. I couldn't even make a muscle in my leg. I felt like no muscles in my leg. I was already skinny. It was like my leg was dead.

When I was paralysed by polio at 13, I went into an isolation hospital and couldn't sit up, so I only took liquid food from spouted cups which the masked nurses would bring in and feed to me. I saw my parents only through glass; we couldn't touch.

I got really, really sick with a horrible disease called transverse myelitis; I lost my legs. I couldn't play anymore. It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Multiple Sclerosis is obviously close to my heart and I'm determined to make a difference in the lives of people who suffer from the disease by raising the profile of MS, as well as raising funds for advocacy and research.

I do not want medical men to discuss whether or not my work is valuable, because I know what it will do. I want them to tell me how best this new knowledge of rapidly restoring paralysed people to health and strength can be applied where it is needed.

What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.

Then I got a bad back injury, and they thought I wasn't going to have any feeling in my legs.

I am not the paraplegic seated permanently in his chair or the able-bodied person on her feet. Identity for a hemiplegic is a shifty thing.

My fiancee's brother-in-law was recently paralysed in an accident and it really brought home the fact that thousands of young people live with spinal injuries. It's an issue I wish had more coverage.

I was told as a teenager that I would never walk again.

I have a form of Parkinson's disease, which I don't like. My legs don't move when my brain tells them to. It's very frustrating.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

I went to several different grade schools all over the West Coast. I got polio when I was 8 and spent eight months in the hospital and a rehab clinic in Seattle.

It finally became clear to me that they had no hopes of my ever walking again.

I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles.

It's not well appreciated, but over half of the world's population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition, and because of poor technology, too often, conditions result in disability and a poorer quality of life. Basic levels of physiological function should be a part of our human rights. Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose -- the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one, in the case of seeing-impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. As a society, we can achieve these human rights, if we accept the proposition that humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability.

I don't sing now, because I had polio when I was 15, bulbar polio. This was when the epidemic was happening. And I was lucky that it didn't affect my lungs or my legs. It went to my face and kind of paralyzed my vocal chords, and I wasn't able to sing. And they said I was very lucky that I would get over it, which I did.

I don't think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

When FDR died in 1945, he was still paralyzed from the waist down. After he died, his portrait was put on the dime. Through his illness, he went out of his way to minimize his difficulties. Of the thousands of pictures taken of him, only two show him in a leg brace or a wheelchair.

I want Alzheimer's. I want Lou Gehrig's disease. I want Parkinson's. I want Huntington's. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.