how did Stephen Hawking have overcome learning disabilities
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The official news alert announcing that world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking had died at age 76 popped up on my phone Wednesday, just a few minutes after I first heard about his death. Moments later, my social media feeds were inundated with odes and exaltations to the man who undoubtedly changed the face of physics.
The first image I saw was a cartoon by artist Mitchell Toy. It shows Hawking’s silhouette, standing straight and tall, gazing into the cosmos ― several yards away from his empty wheelchair. Another cartoon followed, this one drawn by Ia Wun Hsu, in which a pixelated Hawking is lifted from his chair and swallowed by a black hole.
I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, or EDS, when I was 27. EDS is an inherited degenerative collagen disorder that causes a myriad of symptoms. Collagen is one of the major structural components of the body ― it is both the bricks that make us up and the mortar between them. When collagen is written incorrectly at a genetic level, the implications can be far-reaching, life-altering and sometimes life-shortening. A run-down of my daily symptoms would easily take up this entire piece, but at its simplest, I deal with incapacitating chronic pain caused by unexpected joint dislocations that occur more times a day than I can count.
My diagnosis answered a lot of questions about mysteries in my medical history ― mysteries I’d spent years trying to solve. It also taught me our society views disability as inherently unfavorable, which then affects our attitudes toward accessibility. You can clearly see that negative association in the above articles; in each of these pieces, the language used describes Hawking’s ALS as something that held him back.
There is no denying that ALS is a deeply debilitating condition that affected every aspect of Hawking’s life in the same way that EDS permeates every aspect of mine. I live in pain every single day, pain that cannot be mitigated by medications and will not be corrected by surgery. I will live and eventually die in an agony that increases with each repetitive injury caused by dislocation.