What If You Lived Your Whole Life Through a Keyboard?
Tags: Life Lessons, Muscular Dystrophy, Advice, Software Engineering, Disability

What If You Lived Your Whole Life Through a Keyboard?

What if from your wheelchair, the click of a button could bring all your dreams to life? BlogZ Follow Dec 20, 2020 · 3 min read

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Imagine living a life so influential a young women you never knew sits at her computer to write a blog post in your honor.

A life so impressive that your doctors can’t believe what they read about you on paper until they see it with their own eyes.

A life where despite your condition stealing your ability to walk, you moved faster than anyone around you.

This was the case for The Great Gordon Anderson Sterling.

He had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a (usually) genetic progressive neuromuscular disease affecting 1 in 3,500 males. Their DNA does not appropriately code for the production of the protein dystrophin.

Dystrophin provides stability and structure to the muscle cell membrane. Without it, muscles disintegrate over time, weaken and cause significant functional loss that only gets worse with time.

Despite his disorder and all of the health complications that come along with it, Gordon thrived, especially in the field of computer software engineering.

His obituary in the Boston Globe speaks to all of his accomplishments.

He graduated from high school. He and his friend together developed Apple IBM software that allowed for exchanges between different computer systems.

He was an intern at Analog Devices for 6 summers before becoming full-time staff. He wrote software that ended up in many people’s phones.

Despite not being able to walk, using a tracheotomy to breathe and a feeding tube to gain nutrients, he finished his degree in electrical engineering.

He went on to be held in the highest regard among the computer science community. His obituary speaks to how others would schedule themselves to arrive at work at the same time as he would be rolling down his van’s ramp into work in his wheelchair, so they could catch a quick tech lesson.

He did everything one might question whether or not they could upon receiving such a diagnosis.

He shattered every expectation that you find about what life would look like if you google Duchenne. He showed that what life looks like is highly dependent on one’s own level of self-efficacy.

He lived years far beyond what the medical literature would suggest for where research stood when he was here.

He graduated from college. He worked a full-time job.

The work he produced in his field was highly beneficial to society and the field of technology. He married. He lived independently. He owned a home.

He hired his own team of doctors and nurses to provide him with around the clock care. He got to work every day.

He woke up with purpose, and he didn’t question why things were the way they were.

He simply considered every day a gift. He didn’t need to search for things to be different.

Everything about his life was the keyboard. With just 26 letters and 10 numbers to arrange, he held the key to bringing all his dreams to life.

He wanted everyone to know not to let their situation limit them. “I have tried to be an example that other disabled folk can use to figure out their own futures. I like to be visible and active so people will see that it is possible to have an interesting life, despite the onset of disability.”

As it turns out, my younger brother lives with the same condition as Gordon. He too wants to be a software engineer, a programmer as he tells us.

I came across Gordon’s story as prep material that was listed for my classmates and me to read to prepare for a class on Muscular Dystrophy in PT school.

From Gordon we can learn that you yourself decide what it is that would make your life worth living. That you possess the power to bring to life all the greatness within you.

He teaches us that perhaps the key to your dreams is hidden in plain sight, already within your grasp. And perhaps it always was.