Disabled singer's wheelchair dilemma

Geoff Adams-Spink
BBC News website disability affairs correspondent

Disabled singer/songwriter Karen Sheader, who launches a new CD of her work on Thursday, is wondering whether to have an operation that could end her days as a wheelchair user.

Karen Sheader is happy to be on four wheels

Sheader, from

Hartlepool, was the lead singer of disabled rock group, The Fugertivs.

She has been visually impaired since birth, but recently had an accident which left her with a badly broken leg.

Because she has a rare bone condition she was told that she would never regain her mobility.

But she recently met a surgeon who told her he thought he could help her to walk again.

Since her accident - she fell eight feet into a freezing cold stream - she has used a mobility scooter to get around.

"Because I identify quite strongly now as a disabled person, there's a bit of me that thinks there's nothing wrong with this," she says.

The kind of hatred that people can have for you sometimes is astonishing Karen Sheader

Sheader says that most non-disabled people assume that she would want to walk again.

Because she is not in any pain, she is asking herself whether the surgery might make matters worse.

But there is another, more philosophical reason behind her hesitation: she finds people more readily understand her condition now she uses a wheelchair.

"People used to think there was something wrong with me but they weren't quite sure what it was," she says.

"Since I got the wheelchair, I've got 'the badge' if you like."

Over the years she has found the attitude of others so incomprehensible that she has dedicated the title track of her new album, Planet of the Blind, to the subject.

"One guy in particular was persecuting me because he thought I was making up the fact that I was visually impaired," she says.

The man also tried to run Sheader over on a number of occasions.

"The kind of hatred that people can have for you sometimes is astonishing," she says.

Inspiration

Sheader came to songwriting, having written poetry in her youth.

She formed The Fugertivs with an ex-boyfriend, but the band broke up after their relationship ended.

It was after watching another disabled singer - the late Ian Stanton - perform that she decided to use her artistic talent to try to change people's minds about disability.

Sheader's songs explore the joys and frustrations of disability

Another of the tracks - All for the Best - was inspired by the sterilisation of a woman with learning disabilities at her mother's request.

"She told me she was having bad period pains, and I quipped that the old-fashioned cure was to have a baby," she says.

"She told me she wouldn't be having any babies because her mum got her an operation when she was 20.

"I didn't realise that sort of thing still went on, but obviously it does."

In the same group of people, Sheader also met another woman with cerebral palsy who had been left angry and bitter by years of institutional care.

Song for Tess is about a middle-aged woman's despair and disappointment, and her anger at having been locked up for daring to vent her frustration.

Sheader says: "She looked like somebody's granny - she should have been somebody's granny, but she'd never had the opportunity."

Planet of the Blind is launched at the Town Hall Theatre, Hartlepool on Thursday 19 May at 1930 BST.