My friend and colleague Professor Wendy Harbor, who teaches disability studies at Syracuse University, and who is deaf, decided recently to undergo surgery for a cochlear implant. If you know anything about the culture wars within the disability world in general, and the deaf community in particular, you know that her decision to pursue “some” hearing is a complicated business. I know something about the complications, having undergone surgery to restore my eyes to “legal blindness” after a decade of seeing nothing. My struggle–a quandary really–was whether to have some visual function after living for years as a fully blind person who believed (and continues to believe) that the medical model of disability is wrong. Those of us who champion the rights of people with disabilities are, for the most part, people who happen to have disabilities–and more to the point, we’re people who have rejected the idea that medicine should define what an appropriate or successful life can or should be. No one should be subjected to definitional second-class status because they have a functional impairment, and yet, this is the upshot of the prevailing notion within medical circles. If you can’t be cured you’re no longer valuable. If you don’t have a disability you may think this representation of the “medical model” of disability is histrionic, but it’s largely accurate and I’ve seldom met a person with a disability who didn’t have his or her own horror story about a dismissive medical doctor.
And so why would a disability rights activist decide to ameliorate or experiment? In my own case it was largely because I’d grown to see that procedures in contemporary ophthalmology had developed to the point where I might get some functioning back. I see partial vision as an accommodation–following my surgery I can read large print with my new Mac and the iPad. I can’t do this for very long. I need voice on my computer for part of the day. I can only read with one eye. It would not be advisable for me to give up my guide dog. Still, I have more options for acquiring information, and for adjusting to multiple environments. I like to think that I’ve helped my disability grow more colorful feathers.
Wendy Harbor now has a blog detailing her experiences as she transitions to her implant and it makes for really interesting reading. Enjoy!
https://wharbour.expressions.syr.edu
Planet of the Blind 
I so appreciate the way you write, your voice — your reasoning always beautifully tempered by emotion and sensibilities. Thanks so much.
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