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Today I picked up two passengers from the hospital. Both used wheelchairs. One passenger was a guy in his mid-thirties who used an electric wheelchair. The other was an older guy who used an oxygen tank and a manual wheelchair.

After I got back on the road, I listened to them chat. The older guy was admiring the electric wheelchair, and they started talking shop. The older guy has been thinking about getting an electric chair, but has been balking at the cost. "The Vet's association told me that one of those would cost me about $2500," he said.

"Oh no," said the younger guy. "This is a $7500 chair."

The older guy boggled. "Seventy-five hundred?"

"Yup," said the younger guy, stroking the armrest of his chair. "This is my baby."

When I was in college, I did some time working for the bus service's paratransit branch. The drivers were very buddy-buddy with the passengers, since we were all college students, and I became fairly good friends with some of them.

One of those passengers was "Dan." Just after graduating from college, Dan was in a bad car accident and suffered a major spinal cord injury. He had lost the use of his legs, and had problems moving his hands.

When I met Dan, he immediately struck me as an extremely attractive guy. He was a psychology student, a fraternity member, and liked to go out to the bars with us. He was one of the gang... Who just happened to use a wheelchair.

His health wasn't the best, though. He smoked, and suffered from pneumonia often. He tired easily. He had sores from sitting all the time.

I learned a lot from Dan. For example, he told me once that he put on a condom each night to collect the urine from his catheter. "The lady at the drug store must think I'm a stud," he said. "I go in there every two weeks and buy a jumbo box of condoms."

One night at a bar, after Dan had told us of his plan to make "gimp porn," we were discussing political correctness. He basically didn't care one way or the other if he was called handicapped or disabled. He scoffed at differently abled. He accepted gimp from friends, but would run over the toes of anyone who called him that maliciously.

Someone brought up the mantra of disabled-related PC-ness: "See the person, not the wheelchair." Dan sat up straight, took a swig of his beer, and slammed the bottle back onto the table.

"Look," he said, running his fingers over the spokes of his chair. "I paid $5000 for this chair. Look at my chair! Look at it!"

Everyone has their own pride and joy.