Marca Bristo
PRESIDENT OF ACCESS LIVING | 54 | LINCOLN PARK
Bristo has been a strong voice and policymaker for disabled rights and, through Access Living, helps prepare those with disabilities for living on their own. She broke her neck in 1977 when she accidentally dived into shallow water on Pratt Street Beach.
You know, disability was kind of a mysterious thing to me -- to the extent that I knew about disabilities before I became disabled. I grew up on a farm in upstate New York. The disabled people that I remember were few and far between. In part because when you hit school in those years, kids who were disabled weren't going to school, or shipped off to special classrooms outside the building.
You know, disability was kind of a mysterious thing to me -- to the extent that I knew about disabilities before I became disabled. I grew up on a farm in upstate New York. The disabled people that I remember were few and far between. In part because when you hit school in those years, kids who were disabled weren't going to school, or shipped off to special classrooms outside the building.
"I think the disability community is the sleeping giant in electoral politics." Those are the words of Lou Harris. More than any other group or voting bloc, people with disabilities vote along with their disability or single issue. People with disabilities are registered much less than others.
"I think the disability community is the sleeping giant in electoral politics." Those are the words of Lou Harris. More than any other group or voting bloc, people with disabilities vote along with their disability or single issue. People with disabilities are registered much less than others.
Our issues resonate with everyone. Not just people with disabilities. Unfortunately, our constituency hasn't been appreciated during election season. I think most of us are eager to see what the various campaigns will do on disability issues. In the democratic field, we have a lot of good candidates.
I am under the opinion that our country is ready to elect either an African American or woman. If we've ever questioned what an election can mean in the course of history, I think all we need to do is look at this one.
I went to college in Beloit, Wis. This was at the very beginning of the women's movement. I helped one of my faculty members set up the women's studies program on campus. Feminism was kind of starting to take hold. That later began to shape not only who I was as a person, but also how I saw myself in society and my place in it.
When I completed my nursing degree at Rush, I began the process of working as a labor and delivery nurse in order to become eligible for midwifery.
I had lost my job after my injury, and I just assumed, OK, you can't walk, so you can't work. It was remarkable to me how quickly -- within six months -- my brain had been reframed to think, "Well, I'm disabled. I can't work." The change in the way you see yourself had already started to happen to me.
The head of nursing at this women's hospital called me up and said, "How would you like to come back to work?" When I went in to see her, she decided to take three jobs apart and put them back together again so that each nurse had different tasks, enabling me to do the sedentary tasks. One boring day, I sat down with all the charts of my women's patients that were disabled. I had written all their names on my ink blotter and pulled all their charts.
I don't know why, I don't know what I was looking for, but it changed my life. What I found in the charts, were page after page of blanks. Things like, "Are you sexually active?"; "Are you using birth control?"; "Have you ever had an abortion?"; "Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?", etc. Almost all of the questions in these 26 charts that related to sex were blank. I saw the pattern and I got furious. I took the charts up to my supervisor and showed them to her. She said, "This is terrible, will you help me fix it?"
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