Hawking was NOT a quadriplegic at birth. He was diagnosed with ALS after he lost his balance and fell down a flight of stairs.
"It was a great shock to me to discover that I had motor neurone disease. I had never been very well co-ordinated physically as a child. I was not good at ball games, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers. Maybe for this reason, I didn't care much for sport or physical activities. But things seemed to change when I went to Oxford, at the age of 17. I took up coxing and rowing. I was not Boat Race standard, but I got by at the level of inter-College competition.
In my third year at Oxford, however, I noticed that I seemed to be getting more clumsy, and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason.
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Up to 1974, I was able to feed myself, and get in and out of bed.
Note by this time he was already world famous.
Jane managed to help me, and bring up the children, without outside help. However, things were getting more difficult, so we took to having one of my research students living with us. In return for free accommodation, and a lot of my attention, they helped me get up and go to bed.
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After this, I had to have 24 hour nursing care. This was made possible by grants from several foundations.
Note that NHS doesn't pay for his 24 hr nursing care. An ordinary person in his condition wouldn't have 24 hr nursing care and may not even be around anymore. NHS hasn't supplied the means by which he speaks either:
....
a computer expert in California, called Walt Woltosz, heard of my plight. He sent me a computer program he had written, called Equalizer. This allowed me to select words from a series of menus on the screen, by pressing a switch in my hand. The program could also be controlled by a switch, operated by head or eye movement. When I have built up what I want to say, I can send it to a speech synthesizer. At first, I just ran the Equalizer program on a desk top computer.
However David Mason, of Cambridge Adaptive Communication, fitted a small portable computer and a speech synthesizer to my wheel chair. This system allowed me to communicate much better than I could before. "
chninternational.com
Its amazing that liberals make foolish assumptions and pass them off as "facts" and "truth" and even malign more knowledgeable persons. Not attractive or admirabble habits. |
