My Kingdom for an Elevator

My Kingdom for an Elevator

Nicolaus Mills: My Kingdom for an Elevator

I sprained my ankle the other week during my daily five-mile run. Then I went back to running sooner than I should have, and by the time my ankle healed, following treatment by my doctor at the Hospital for Special Surgery, I had gotten an introduction to what it means to be handicapped in New York City.

The short answer is that everything becomes an ordeal.

Getting down subways steps is murder. Getting on a bus with high steps is painful. Getting across the street before the light changes is a challenge. The compensation is the kindness of strangers. A teenager gave me her seat on the bus after I limped my way onboard. A seventy-year-old picked up the cane I was using when I dropped it in the drugstore. But in the end, of course, nothing made up for having actions that were once second nature become self-conscious.

I was lucky. I heal fast, and while my ankle was mending, I was able to use the stationary bike at the sports club at which I regularly work out. I didn?t even gain weight while I was hurt. But in a year during which the Americans with Disabilities Act marked its twentieth anniversary, I became aware of how little I have thought about the act since its passage in 1990. For me, the Americans with Disabilities Act has never had the political glamour of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. People with disabilities don?t, after all, arouse the kind of hatred we associate with racism.

If you can?t walk easily or you are confined to a wheelchair, however, the distinction between being viewed with hatred and being viewed with indifference may not seem all that wide. In both cases your life is simply not your own. Except in the privacy of your own home, it?s hard not worry about what lies around the corner.

I have no idea what it will cost to get more working elevators for New York?s subways or how expensive it will be to make sure every apartment building in the city has a ramp that someone in a wheel chair can easily negotiate without help from a doorman. But when they come, such improvements will be worth every penny.

If with just an ankle sprain, I can be made to feel like a second-class citizen, I can only begin to imagine what life is like for someone who is never going to have true freedom of movement.