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Darryl Dickey

My honest opinion is, within almost two years of being an amputee, I’ve learned that people who are amputees aren’t respected. Our struggles are often glanced at and overlooked; I can say this because before I became an amputee, I didn’t know a single amputee or anything about them.

The government is sometimes worse than people you run into on a daily basis. If a person has worked most of their life, has paid into Social Security, and can no longer do the work they did before, and have to live the rest of their life in pain, why do they have to fight for help? Why do some organizations say they are here to help but have so many stipulations that most amputees, like myself, really see no help? And what’s most disrespectful is how they look at above-knee amputees like below-knee amputees in the eyes of the law, and that’s ridiculous! Some below-knee amputees return to work within a month. When you lose a knee, it changes your life drastically, way more than for below-knee amputees.

We become amputees for different reasons, so many of us require different things. As we all know, most of us see multiple doctors, which is costly. We also need other things, such as prescriptions, assistive devices, etc. Without these items and extra care from doctors, many of us would be unable to survive. We wouldn’t be able to afford the items we need since most of us can’t work and often experience problems in getting government assistance. These law makers need to open their eyes and actually come visit us amputees. Not just for an hour … hang with us for a week or two to really see how difficult our lives are and how we have to fight daily just to keep our sanity.