Though I’m sure this is not an experience unique to me, I found myself, in reading stories of women writing their bodies in Stories of Illness and Healing, making connections to my own illnesses and experiences with the world of medicine. As I have said in previous posts, I have Type 1 diabetes (so I am a PWD – person with diabetes). I also have a prolactinoma (a small, noncancerous pituitary tumor), and I’m anemic. I don’t seek to claim that my conditions (or combination thereof) are as life threatening or disruptive as breast cancer or MS; indeed, such competitive medical comparisons seem immature, inappropriate and ultimately unproductive. However, I did feel a connection to the personal and medical struggles of the women writing about these illnesses. I too have felt the oppression of a patriarchal medical system, the burdensome emphasis on self-help and individual responsibility, “the silencing power of shame,” “isolation from the healthy, isolation from loved ones, and isolation from the body and self,” “cyborg isolation,”
“the mundane horror of medical treatment and diagnosis,” “the incessant demands of healthy society to have a ‘positive attitude toward illness and always to be grateful to medical staff,” that my illness “was the punishment for a crime I hadn’t committed,” that “my body is an unreliable source of information about the world,” and experienced the “judgemental comments of outsiders…well-intedned advice of acquaintances…and the indefference of some of my extended family.”
I’m in a creative writing workshop this semester, and I have been inspired to write my own body as a method of reflection and healing. If I’m ultimately comfortable sharing my own illness narrative publicly, I’ll post my writing here – hopefully as a “memoir with a mission” rather than a story inviting voyeurism, negotiating my personal experience with its public presentation to the best of my ability. Perhaps I’ll even end up a “diabetes blogger” similar to the “MS bloggers” Collette Sosnowy is studying for her dissertation.
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