How spinal surgery changed my mind on disability’s great debate

I’m “writing” (speech to texting) this blog post lying in a hospital bed — Room 22, Bed W (for “window”) — in the neurosurgery department of the Tel Aviv Medical Center (Ichilov). I was just brought up here after 24 hours in the intensive care unit following emergency surgery on my spine. To my left, in Bed D (for “door”), lies an 80-year-old man who seems to have been very handsome in his better years. He’s had a stroke, he mumbles, and he needs his diapers changed every two hours.

I underwent extensive and urgent cervical spine surgery. A cervical vertebra, along with its adjacent discs, were removed and replaced with a metal plate and screws — to release my gradually failing spine from immense pressure. I was probably just a few weeks away from becoming partially or completely paralyzed from the neck down.

It all started a few months ago with a strange pain shooting down my left leg. I figured it was just one of those things. I’m 47, I’ve been in a wheelchair my whole life, I played wheelchair tennis professionally for many years, and I hand-cycle daily. What’s a little leg pain?

A few weeks later, I started feeling tingling and weakness in two fingers on my right hand. I still wasn’t impressed. The hand cycling could easily explain that, right?

Only when it spread to the other arm and the pain became unbearable did I decide to dig deeper. It took just a couple of weeks from my first EMG test — when I was still convinced it was just some nerve irritation — to lying on an operating table with a terrifying diagnosis — a damaged spinal cord that needed immediate repair. I was thrown into the world of becoming (more) disabled – the urgency, the operating room, the unpleasant waking from anesthesia and the wait for good news from your doc. For a minute there, I experienced the taste of it, and even though my procedure was successful I could clearly imagine the scenario where it wasn’t. The doc coming out to see you when you wake up. I am sorry he says. We couldn’t save the spine. You are paralyzed.

But my suffering wasn’t in vain, because I came back with answers. And not just answers — the answer to the eternal debate in the disability world. The Holy Grail. The Superclásico. The question no one dares to answer:

What’s worse (or better, if you prefer), becoming disabled, or being born disabled?
Well, I’ve now experienced both — and I have an answer.

Whenever the debate comes up in the little café at our sport center, when the wheelchair basketball players roll out after practice, or during the water cooler break at wheelchair tennis, the core argument is always the same: When you become disabled, you lose something, and you have to learn how to live again without it. Maybe it’s your legs, maybe it’s your arm, maybe it’s your eyesight. That loss, they say, makes it harder to become disabled than to be born that way.

As someone proudly disabled from birth, I always respond: “Yeah, but you didn’t have to grow up as a disabled kid.”

That usually balances the argument. People understand that growing up with a disability and having to face these challenges in one’s early years, is a pretty strong counterpoint. At the very least, it makes the two experiences difficult to compare.

But my recent events — the risk of losing the use of my upper body at 47 — changed my perspective.

I still believe that growing up disabled comes with unique and underestimated challenges. But having been in a wheelchair my whole life, and now suddenly facing the potential loss of my upper body, I’ve gained a new outlook:

It is difficult to grow up with a disability, but losing function as an adult, ladies and gentlemen, is hell.

And hell, my friends, has layers. It’s so much more than just the physical loss — it’s the robbery of habits, routines, and tiny dignities you didn’t even know you were carrying like medals on your chest.

Taking a shower, having a cup of coffee, eating solid foods, going to the office.

So, what’s the final verdict in the Great Disability Debate?

Sorry my brothers and sisters of congenital disabilities, I know our lives are no picnic, but I am on team “becoming disabled” from now on. Let’s take it to the water cooler.

Meanwhile, back here in Room 22, Bed W, the sun is starting to hit the window just right. My neighbor is mumbling at the ceiling, and the nurse is arguing with someone. Life, it seems, insists on rolling forward — bent, bruised, bolted together, but stubbornly, beautifully alive.

Maybe that’s the real miracle.