This past weekend, Disney World hosted its 2012 Half-Marathon, a race event sponsored by Cigna. I know of this race because my wife has made it her goal to run in it next year (and given how well she crushed her time in the Philadelphia Rock and Roll Half-Marathon last summer, I have no doubts that she will do well).
So when I tuned in to see how things went in Orlando, I was surprised to see an interesting bit from Cigna itself touting its support of the run. Bully for Cigna, I thought, to be such a prominent health insurer, but also to put its money where its mouth is and to support an event that puts on a pedestal an endeavor that really requires people to push themselves to be their physical, mental and spiritual best. But that wasn't the part that really caught my eye.
As readers of this blog may recall, I quite enjoy calling out insurers who do good deeds, and this is one of those cases where I think Cigna deserves a rather large round of applause. For not only did Cigna support the Disney race, but its CEO, David Cordani, ran in it (along with numerous other Cigna employees) as part of another initiative that company supports: Achilles International.
Achilles International is a non-profit group that helps athletes with disabilities. And its Freedom Team of Wounded Veterans specifically reaches out to those who have sustained injuries while serving our country so they might continue to compete. The photo running alongside this blog entry shows Cordani standing alongside Lance Corporal Matias Ferreira, a Marine who lost both of his legs while serving in Afghanistan in January 2011. See those curved prostheses where his feet used to be? Yeah, he ran 13.1 miles on those. And he did it less than a year after he lost the legs he was born with. That, my friends, is nothing short of incredible. Cigna should be rightfully proud to help people such as Ferreira not only retain his mobility, but to retain the same champion spirit that led him to serve, that led him to survive, and that led him to cross that finish line. Really, it is pretty difficult to understate how awesome this all is.
On a more philosophical note, though (come on, you knew I was going to go there) I am reminded of an article I read from the Wall Street Journal a good 15 years or more ago that detailed how a runner who had lost both his legs, was continuing to compete on his artificial legs, and how in the most recent Paralympics, he had managed to set a new time for a run (I think it was the 100M) dash. I remember from the story that the legs used did not seem as advanced as the running prosthetics available today, and I wonder how much faster that runner could have clocked in using today's medical technology. How incredible it is that we can live in a time where one might lose both legs and still credibly ask oneself to what degree they might improve on their 100M dash time.
But more importantly, I recalled how the article kept referring to this runner as "disabled." Cigna's own press did the same, just as I have used the same parlance in this very article. I mean no criticism against any specific party by bringing this up, but we all really need to find a better way to refer to people who have suffered a debilitating injury, but through the benefit of rehabilitation and medical technology, have developed a set of alternate capabilities to make up for what they lost. Because I'll tell you, people, these folks are most definitely not disabled. Just as I could not run a 100M dash in the time that Paralympian ran it, I still can't run a half-marathon. That does not make me disabled. Nor can I really call Lance Corporal Ferriera and his fellow Achilles athletes disabled, even though without their prosthetics, they cannot run at all.
This is a linguistic shortcoming that English has yet to address adequately, though we are at a time now where sooner or later either we are going to have to decide that the word "disabled" means something else, or we are going to have to come up with a word that describes folks like Ferriera in terms that do not suggest certain kinds of limitation. This is the miracle of modern medical science, and the great gift of our society that it is accesible to so many. But collectively, I think we have failed to progress our thinking as fast as we have progressed our science, and eventually, it is our thinking that drives our science. And the more we think on this, the more we might think on a grander scale when it comes to disabilities and how we deal with them, how we treat them, how we fund their treatment, etc. It is a very touchy subject to tackle, really, but to have lost a body part does not mean today what it once did, and as we push ahead in abour ability to rebuild those of us who are injured, let us also rebuild our understanding of what it really means to be whole once more.
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