I was riding pillion on my friend's motorbike, and we met with an accident which badly injured my right leg. I was bedridden for three years and used crutches for one year before I fully recovered.
My mother has rheumatoid arthritis. I don't want to lose the ability to jump up and walk across the room or move around with the energy I'm used to having. That's far more important to me than a wrinkle or two.
Then I got a bad back injury, and they thought I wasn't going to have any feeling in my legs.
I think it was hard at first for my dad to transition to being immobile.
Were it not for the bone in the legge, all the world would turne Carpenters (to make them crutches).
My dad gave me my first bike at 16. I soon fell off and was in a wheelchair for weeks. I haven't fallen since.
I was too big to even contemplate exercise. I had to use a walking stick and a wheelchair to get around.
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.
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 a super active kid, so I've always been aware of where my body is in space, and I think when I had my legs amputated, it makes you more aware of your body, and because I don't use my legs, I use more of my hands.
I am all for anything that is going to better equip a person who is physically challenged in any way, to have an opportunity to be able to do what they are able to do.
There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in?
People with Parkinson's are not some weird people on the edge of human experience.
I wear my prosthetics legs every day, and when I train in the gym, I call them my Lamborghini, because both legs and sockets, which extend up to my hips to keep the legs on via a suction seal, cost about $305,815.
The gun lobby finds waiting periods inconvenient. You have only to ask my husband how inconvenient he finds his wheelchair from tome to time.
When I was born, they put casts on my legs 'cause I had some kind of dysplasia or something. My legs were all messed up.
My whole family is in orthotics and prosthetics, so I grew up having to check for scoliosis every week. 'Come over. Let me feel your spine.'
I have never personally seen a hand transplant that is more useful than a prosthesis.
I started accessible GPS research in 1994 and the first version became available on a laptop in 2000.
I did not walk for the first four years of my life.
I've had journalists asking me, 'What do we call you - is it handicapped, are you disabled, physically challenged?' I said, 'Well hopefully you could just call me Aimee. But if you have to describe it, I'm a bilateral below-the-knee amputee.'
in California I began to think that, except on the beaches, no-one had the use of their legs.
Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
I have a son, Mason, who is disabled - cerebral palsy - and he does not walk independently, sit independently or speak. He uses a talking computer. I started becoming an advocate for him when he was 3 years old.
When I ask people what they think of when they hear the term 'cerebral palsy,' I usually get one of two responses. They either think of a smiling, crumpled child in a wheelchair on a poster or commercials on late night TV with lawyers enticing parents of CP kids to sue the pants off their obstetrician.
