In a scene of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway mentions how ill George, another character, looks. Fitzgerald then gives him one of the many profound lines of the novel: "It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."
I have struggled with this distinction. Foucault and queer theory have struggled with any distinction. I am not what I experience, nor a tidy sum of my actions or beliefs. Sometimes I am sick, sometimes I am well. Much more frequently I am both.
The more clear distinctions happen rarely - though they have both happened recently.
I was in the hospital a few weeks ago with a UTI. This simple little SOB landed me in Abbott for three days. Some people, god knows why, talk their way into a hospital. I generally resist going in and spend most of my time in trying to get out. I've thought about being that guy who sneaks out, but I respect most of my doctors and nurses. Besides, this time, I was sick. Like, sick sick.
This has happened to me a few times; I go from feeling fine - you and me fine - to asking for a ride to the ER because I can't hold anything down and I've got a climbing fever of 103 or 104. This typically takes six to eight hours. I undergo a profound transformation from the time I walk in the door, clothed in my clothes, my wrists free from hospital plastic wrist bands, looking and feeling like a healthy person. This is when I feel awful, but am still my own person - sick but not hospital sick. Not naked in the gown. I might lean on a wall for support but I am leaning with my shirt sleeves, with my phone in my pocket, with my shoes on.
An hour later I am in the gown, toting an IV pole. And I am seen anew. The hospital is the place where I am home. Think about that. Where are you 'home?' When I walk through a hospital for some other reason I am a visitor - passing through this land of the sick, this quarantine of disease and infirmity. I think of the hospital as hallways doorways and elevators. Transience. A place to pass through. When I am 'sick,' the hospital is a room, a bed from which I move reluctantly and with caution. It is the space between my bed and the bathroom. Asking for another blanket. Asking for a glass of water. Asking for a drug to make me feel less nauseous. Being asked to take four deep breaths. Listening to the ragged breath of the guy sharing my room. I'm pretty sure he never left. In the hospital I am attended to. I can ask for things. I give up something to gain access to this treatment. Perhaps this is what Fitzgerald was talking about when describing George Wilson, desperate with jealousy - a person loses a piece of themselves to sickness or death when the hospital is the place from where they exist.
I imagine a struggle for nurses as well, working with dozens of partial people every day, humans at a valley of dignity. On the one hand there is so much suffering in the humanity of these people, of me in a bed, dirty, unshowered, weak and emasculated - how could a nurse remain open to such suffering while administering care within the confines of a hospital. There are only so many kinds of nurses, and at the heart of it just two - those who see patients as humans and those who cannot. I do not fault those who cannot - I cannot. What an awful place to be; sick.
Being well is much more familiar to us - to you, really. Biking to work on a crisp morning, passing cars at a stop light, dodging potholes, having cold thighs taut with blood. Powering up a hill with some leg left at the top. This is being well. It is miraculous, and the gift of being so often sick is to have ready access to that miracle. Feeling the cold wind on my face is sometimes everything. The unmitigated world is a miracle, but the condition of this experience is wellness.
Most of the time I live between sick and well. I'm like a spy, surveilling the country of the well, passing as not-sick. I don't make a habit of talking about why I missed school, or how I spent my weekend trying to catch up on sleep and work. But I do those things - miss school and sleep a lot. I struggle to carry my share along with my guilt for not always carrying it. I navigate the collateral damage my health inflicts on the people who love me.
I standardize my answers; I rarely know how to talk about myself, or about my weekend. I lie outright sometimes, which comforts me as much as it does them. I sometimes enjoy the secret, that I am secretly sick and most people would never know. Other times I feel alienated and alone in the middle of a crowd - that people do not know my reality.
Of course these experiences are not uniquely mine, but I may experience them more profoundly than most. We all attend to the various unfolding crises of our lives. And many of us exist in the space between things.
Nick Carraway eventually abandoned the jaded East to return to the cultural subtitles of the Middle West. The hard, defined living with the likes of Jordan and Tom and Daisy didn't suit his temperament and he went home. Plurality affords him a more flexible interpretation of who he is, and that seems to suit him. Thanks for reading!
I have struggled with this distinction. Foucault and queer theory have struggled with any distinction. I am not what I experience, nor a tidy sum of my actions or beliefs. Sometimes I am sick, sometimes I am well. Much more frequently I am both.
The more clear distinctions happen rarely - though they have both happened recently.
I was in the hospital a few weeks ago with a UTI. This simple little SOB landed me in Abbott for three days. Some people, god knows why, talk their way into a hospital. I generally resist going in and spend most of my time in trying to get out. I've thought about being that guy who sneaks out, but I respect most of my doctors and nurses. Besides, this time, I was sick. Like, sick sick.
This has happened to me a few times; I go from feeling fine - you and me fine - to asking for a ride to the ER because I can't hold anything down and I've got a climbing fever of 103 or 104. This typically takes six to eight hours. I undergo a profound transformation from the time I walk in the door, clothed in my clothes, my wrists free from hospital plastic wrist bands, looking and feeling like a healthy person. This is when I feel awful, but am still my own person - sick but not hospital sick. Not naked in the gown. I might lean on a wall for support but I am leaning with my shirt sleeves, with my phone in my pocket, with my shoes on.
An hour later I am in the gown, toting an IV pole. And I am seen anew. The hospital is the place where I am home. Think about that. Where are you 'home?' When I walk through a hospital for some other reason I am a visitor - passing through this land of the sick, this quarantine of disease and infirmity. I think of the hospital as hallways doorways and elevators. Transience. A place to pass through. When I am 'sick,' the hospital is a room, a bed from which I move reluctantly and with caution. It is the space between my bed and the bathroom. Asking for another blanket. Asking for a glass of water. Asking for a drug to make me feel less nauseous. Being asked to take four deep breaths. Listening to the ragged breath of the guy sharing my room. I'm pretty sure he never left. In the hospital I am attended to. I can ask for things. I give up something to gain access to this treatment. Perhaps this is what Fitzgerald was talking about when describing George Wilson, desperate with jealousy - a person loses a piece of themselves to sickness or death when the hospital is the place from where they exist.
I imagine a struggle for nurses as well, working with dozens of partial people every day, humans at a valley of dignity. On the one hand there is so much suffering in the humanity of these people, of me in a bed, dirty, unshowered, weak and emasculated - how could a nurse remain open to such suffering while administering care within the confines of a hospital. There are only so many kinds of nurses, and at the heart of it just two - those who see patients as humans and those who cannot. I do not fault those who cannot - I cannot. What an awful place to be; sick.
Being well is much more familiar to us - to you, really. Biking to work on a crisp morning, passing cars at a stop light, dodging potholes, having cold thighs taut with blood. Powering up a hill with some leg left at the top. This is being well. It is miraculous, and the gift of being so often sick is to have ready access to that miracle. Feeling the cold wind on my face is sometimes everything. The unmitigated world is a miracle, but the condition of this experience is wellness.
Most of the time I live between sick and well. I'm like a spy, surveilling the country of the well, passing as not-sick. I don't make a habit of talking about why I missed school, or how I spent my weekend trying to catch up on sleep and work. But I do those things - miss school and sleep a lot. I struggle to carry my share along with my guilt for not always carrying it. I navigate the collateral damage my health inflicts on the people who love me.
I standardize my answers; I rarely know how to talk about myself, or about my weekend. I lie outright sometimes, which comforts me as much as it does them. I sometimes enjoy the secret, that I am secretly sick and most people would never know. Other times I feel alienated and alone in the middle of a crowd - that people do not know my reality.
Of course these experiences are not uniquely mine, but I may experience them more profoundly than most. We all attend to the various unfolding crises of our lives. And many of us exist in the space between things.
Nick Carraway eventually abandoned the jaded East to return to the cultural subtitles of the Middle West. The hard, defined living with the likes of Jordan and Tom and Daisy didn't suit his temperament and he went home. Plurality affords him a more flexible interpretation of who he is, and that seems to suit him. Thanks for reading!
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