Reclaiming illness, death and healthcare

I grew up in the medical world. sterile, incubated, a container away from the rest of the world where I was told to heal. standards of cleanliness and purity were held over my head, and only now as a full grown adult living with a degree of separation from the medical monotony that I was never allowed before am I seeing the long term effects this has had on me.

I could launch into a series on how the purification of healing, and the contamination associated with illness, has tunnelled caves into my existence. I was recently sitting on my therapist’s couch unpacking how this childhood obsession (that was placed on me, that I did not choose) with control, purity and rigidity translated into an adult belief that I do not deserve good things. Pleasure, joy, beauty, all of those things were the opposite of what I was allowed. I forced myself into a life that didn’t feel like mine, and now let me unravel the layers of how this modern medical reality intersects with puritan religion, christianity and my upbringing in the early 00’s purity movement.

that’s a story for another time.

I was talking to a friend of mine, a fellow transplant recipient, about extraordinary measures. What happens when we exhaust them? Why do we pursue them? And it all traced back to this idea that we’ve handed over our power to an external authority and are waiting for a cosmic sized miracle. I would argue to say we feel we’re entitled to one, especially in western civilizations who exist solely because of colonization and our perceived entitlement to what was never ours in the first place.

“Just because we can doesn’t mean we should” I said, referencing extreme medical interventions that might prolong a life, but at what cost?

I have a portion of the book I’m writing where I talk about all of the places I was told healing lived. In hospital rooms and IV bags, in washing your hands, in the open wound of my body where I was force fed nutrients. And I’m not getting into the debate of whether or not those things were right, or should have been done. But I am saying I was told healing was in compliance, control, rigidity. No one ever told me about healing in dancing, in grassy hills, in another body.

I watched Sky Med recently (if you haven’t watched it yet, the show focuses on medical flight pilots and nurses in northern Manitoba) and there is a scene where an elderly indigenous Canadian woman is diagnosed with cancer. The doctor at the hospital was adamant this person needed to begin chemotherapy, and stay in the hospital to heal. The flight nurse, and the woman’s granddaughter, said that while there might be medicine in the hospital, there’s also medicine outside of it, in this woman’s community, with her land and her traditions.

This is the kind of healing no one told me about. Because what I was handed was a sterile, industrialized version of health and wellness.

I’m grateful for modern medicine that saved my life. and, as I talk to patients every day, as I drive an hour each way through rolling hills to get my blood drawn so a person I’ve never met can analyze my wellbeing, as I walk with people in my community as they come to the end of their lives and realize medical innovations could only take them so far, I fear we’ve missed the point. We’ve handed health, and death, to industries. We’ve lost community care, and what it means to walk alongside one another during these major life shifts. We’ve lost ancient wisdom, traditions, a connection to the land and one another and ourselves. We hide behind things like cleanliness and sterility like we can keep ourselves safe from what affects us all. Walking with someone at the end of their life, the question emerges of why was none of this talked about sooner? We’ve normalized what we lost.

I want to get my hands back into the soil of my life.

Getting your hands back into the soil inevitably involves getting some dirt under your fingernails. It’s gritty and messy and a far cry from the sterile cleanliness we’ve been told is the answer. It’s a reclamation of what has been kept from us.

It’s the wild knowing that everything belongs. That we are part of the larger life cycle, and taking our place back in the way of things.

I’m here for conversations around illness, death and health that have fur and teeth, soil and guts, that are rich in ritual and reclamation.