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SURVIVOR

S. L. ROSEN
S. L. Rosen is a pseudonym.

FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw

"Is he dead?" they whispered, lifting me onto the stretcher and shoving me quickly into the ambulance.

I call myself a "survivor." I have survived death. Survived in a world that doesn’t know what to make of people like me, true; but survived nevertheless. That should be worth something.

A lot of people use the word "survivor" today. There are survivors of bad economic times. Survivors of divorce. People survive layoffs, psychological traumas, deaths of spouses. [People are now calling themselves brain injury survivors and cancer survivors, too; incest survivors, spouse abuse survivors.]

The word "survivor" is uniquely suited to one group of people: people who survive accidents, diseases, and who survive what would have been almost certain death just a few short decades ago. And people deformed, born with cerebral palsy, with stutters, cleft palates, open spines. People about whom society has trouble imagining at all – the sideshow people: freaks, geeks, crips, gimps, people who look funny, talk funny, walk funny. The halt, the lame, and the blind, as the Bible says.

In much earlier times, many of us were killed. Those of us who weren’t killed existed as survivors.

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