This article auto-ethnographically explores my experiences over the course of several years as I transitioned from able bodied, to frequent cane user, who used a scooter to attend academic conferences, to a user of robotic telepresence. I discuss the different affordances that those technologies allow, issues of embodiment, articulation work, agency, and ableism. The telepresence robot did not “fix me” as is often implicated with the medical model of disability (Thomson, 1997), or augment my experience to make it more palatable to the able-bodied majority. Instead, it allowed me to make conscious trade-offs between the affordances of my corporeal body and an emergent cyborg-self in the context of a degenerative auto-immune disease. Thus, in writing this article it is my intention to improve the social acceptance of the disabled cyborg-person, and through improved design to I aim to afford disabled persons choices
