I got my first power wheelchair when I was thirteen and a half years old. I think that was got rid of when I my father sold the house on Brattle in Montgomery. They bought the house when I was two years and seven months old, specifically so I could attend the second-best hearing school in Ohio state, Sycamore Community Schools. I’m featured on p. two-hundred seventy-three. See the full high school yearbook free from the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. My guidance counsellor, Vincent Rahnfeld, called 513-241-KIDS, as I was in his office, and I described the following situation:
“I pulled the plug on my computer-system. I wasn’t all the way in bed, though, and at was 10:11 P.M. Cincinnati time. My father picked me up from my bedroom floor—it was repurposed after my first SEMLS in which I’d had my hamstrings and left Achilles tendon cut and sewn back together, and plaster-casts of solid green were put on my legs from my toes to my iliac crest on November 21, 2005.
As he was beating, I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over. I wondered what day it was five minutes into it. Several hours later, I wondered where I could go to be to graduate high school and stay alive: to a deaf school I would go! But not St. Rita’s off Glennmore and not to Indiana, but to See-bus. I’m only a graduate thanks to The Ohio School for the Deaf. I had to repeat my junior year as my high school English 11 Honors teacher Literature, Chris Kloesz, received but gave my final class grade an F. Why? Who knows…!
They were shorn off ten days later as I’d had too much spasms of the biceps femoris muscles on both sides, so my surgeon, Dr. Thi Do, with the same precision as she’d cut the morning of a week or so before, sliced off my casts. Four of my paediatric physiatrists, David Pruitt, Lainie Holman, Douglas Kinnett and Susan Apkon, prepared the botulinum-A toxin and injected me in six sites. Then, Dr. Do put a new plaster cast on.
I got my second powerchair from Columbus Medical on May 4, 2010. That chair is still functioning and is my back-up chair.
I got my third powerchair, my first Permobil Corpus F3-to-F5 on/around 26 September 2017. It was totalled on 23 October 2019. It was replaced by the responsible party in January 2020. According to an e-mail by an Assistive Technology Professional dated January 21, 2020, the five year Medicare replacement rule follows the date of getting the original chair, September 26, 2017. I was struck by another car on May 1, 2026, and that driver is insured, so it’ll be replaced by that driver’s insurance.
I look forward to getting my fourth powerchair after I relocate.
I strongly recommend that all powerchair users get a chair with tilt and recline. If you are ambulatory as I am, your feet, ankles and knees will thank you.
I have not yet left the continental United States. I received my first passport on/around 27 September 2010. My application was filled by an anonymous civil servant; my passport-book does not have my middle name. That evening, I was late to my GOV 348 class after sending the fee and my application, taught Tuesday and Thursday evenings by Prof. PJ Mattiacci, who taught under a Presidential Fellowship as my political theory professor Brendan Stern did. But Dr. Stern’s class was Monday, Wednesday and Friday from I think 10:00 to 10:50 in the morning. It was the last generation of passport-books on which you could wear spectacles; I had my childhood Coke-bottle glasses and was dressed identically for the photograph as I was for this video-blog for my hearing High School ASL teacher. That passport-book was the identification I used to board the plane on March 11, 2013 to the greater Seattle area—to borrow a phrase from my beloved Mr. Williams, “[w]here I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be…” (81)1. I’ll always keep my passport-book active. One never knows when it’ll come in handy! As one descendant of someone who fled the war mused, “when you’re a Jew, you can never have too many passports“.
Vale.
References
1. Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. 1947. New York:
New Directions, 2004. 81. Print.
Last Updated: 14. January 2026