When I Finally Accepted the Wheelchair
On Pride, Mobility Aids, and What Acceptance Actually Felt Like
Ayoposi Ojelabi
When the wheelchair was first offered to me, I said no.
Not because I could not see that I needed it. I could. My legs were weakening, my balance was unreliable, and the distance between where I was and where I needed to be was becoming harder to cover on foot. The evidence was clear.
I said no because accepting the wheelchair felt like accepting the illness. And I was not ready to do that.
The Standing Frame
The first mobility aid they offered me was not even a wheelchair. It was a standing frame at the neuro-rehabilitation unit at St Pancras Hospital after my first hospital admission in September 2022.
I did not like it.
I stood in it because I had to, but I resisted what it represented. I was still telling myself I would manage. That things would improve. That I would find a way to hold myself upright without equipment designed for people whose bodies had stopped cooperating.
I was still negotiating with the illness. Trying to find the version of it that did not require me to change how I understood myself.
The illness was not negotiating back.
My condition worsened.
When the Wheelchair Was No Longer the Question
By the time my illness reached its most severe stage, the question of whether I would accept a wheelchair had become irrelevant.
I was beyond a wheelchair.
For even the shortest movements, from one part of a ward to another, from a room to a corridor, I was moved on a stretcher. Lying flat. Accompanied. Dependent on the people around me to move my body from one place to the next.
A wheelchair requires a person who can sit upright. I was not that person at that point.
Sunday Mass at Salford Royal
When I was transferred to Salford Royal Hospital in Manchester, I wanted to attend Sunday Mass in the chapel.
It was a small thing. A normal thing. The kind of thing healthy people do without planning or assistance. But getting me from the ward to the chapel required a nurse and a doctor to accompany me, and I made the journey on my hospital bed.
Wheeled through corridors on a bed. Not in a wheelchair. Not walking. On the bed I had been lying in, moved as carefully as any other piece of equipment because that was what my body required at that stage.
I attended Mass.
I was grateful to be there.
But I noticed the people around me in wheelchairs in a way I never had before.
I did not admire them for anything dramatic or inspirational. I admired them because a wheelchair looked, from where I was, like freedom. Like a better option. Like something I would have chosen immediately if it had still been available to me.
The thing I had refused when it was offered now seemed like something worth reaching for.
What Changes When You Are Denied the Thing You Refused
There is a specific lesson in being denied access to something you earlier rejected out of pride.
When the wheelchair was offered and I said no, it felt like a concession, a visible acknowledgement that I was losing. When it was no longer available to me because my condition had moved beyond it, I understood what I had dismissed.
Independence is not the absence of aids. Independence is the capacity to function with whatever support your situation requires.
A wheelchair is not surrender.
A wheelchair is function.
I had confused the two.
It cost me something to learn the difference.
The Journey Back
Recovery, when it came, moved in the opposite direction to decline.
Decline had taken me from walking, to struggling, to a standing frame I resisted, to a wheelchair I refused, to a stretcher I had no choice about.
Recovery moved me back through those stages in reverse. Slowly. With significant effort at each transition.
The hoist came first, the device that lifts a person who cannot yet support their own weight through transfer. Then the banana board for sliding transfers. Then the Sara Steady, a supported standing frame that allows assisted standing. Then, eventually, sitting upright in a wheelchair for longer and longer periods.
Each stage required more from my body than the one before.
Each one also gave more back.
Now
I am now in a wheelchair navigating my recovery. Moving through rehabilitation. Doing what needs to be done from this position while the work of rebuilding continues.
From the outside this might not look like much. A man in a wheelchair. Not walking. Not standing independently. Still in the process.
From the inside it is everything.
I went from being moved on a bed to moving in a chair. From being a body transported by others to being a person who navigates slowly, with effort, with full awareness of how far there still is to go, but navigating.
The distance from stretcher to wheelchair is not a distance most people would think to measure.
But I measure it every day.
It represents months of work, multiple hospitals, and a shift in understanding that took longer than I wish it had.
I refused the wheelchair when it was offered because I thought acceptance meant giving up.
I know now that acceptance was the thing that made movement possible.
Sitting in this chair, doing the work that is still left to do, this is not where I am stopping.
It is where I currently am.
And from here, the direction is forward.
Still in it.
Still going.
Ayoposi Ojelabi|AUTHOR 