Diabetes Art Day

For more information on Diabetes Art Day, please see Lee Ann's blog post here: http://www.thebuttercompartment.com/?p=5441

Sometimes I feel like I'm on a different planet...

I was in a coffee shop reading for school. I was reading an article about patients writing illness narratives. It was arguing that such stories can be seen as a political act against a biomedical model that sees patient merely as disease and not as an whole being. I have issues with some of what the authors argue. I don't really see one nice neat narrative in illness. It's more like different stories of good days and bad days and, while, there might be a beginning, for people with chronic illness there is no end, or at least not in life.

When I got toward the end of paper I started to tear up... which was kind of weird, because I still wasn't into the article. By the end it argues that nurses are in a position to dialogue with patients and create a sort of co-constructed narrative of illness that suits both the practictioner and the patient. Fair enough, I guess, but I just didn't find it incredibly mindblowing. So, I couldn't really figure out why I was suddenly all choked up...

And then I realized that this was playing in the background:

How did we stop listening and seeing one another to the point that we have to write hundreds, if not thousands or millions of pages about love and care? And only to be one-upped by a simple love song playing in the background of a coffee shop?

Quite very simply: I just need you to stand with me-- not ask me inane questions about my medical devices or condition for your own purpose or judge me or tell me I'm not trying hard enough... Just stand by me.

Coincidentally, I came home to find this on my facebook feed:

Life in Imitation...

"Life imitates art, more often than art imitates life. ~Oscar Wilde

There are cyborgs living amongst us, but it is a reality few people recognize. Of course, there is the broad suggestion that the modern reliance on new information and communications technologies now constitutes a new transhuman era, but this is not what I am talking about. What I am referring to are the many people alive today surviving with cybernetic devices attached or implanted in their bodies. We are the true cyborgs of the day.

The term cyborg is a combination of the terms cybernetic + organism and originates in the work of Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in their article Cyborgs and Space (1960). Though their definition of cyborg is restricted to instruments embedded in human functioning that work autonomously, Craig M. Klugman suggests a slightly more complex definition of cyborg based on current science and modern science fiction literature. He divides the term into two categories: the replacement body and the enhancement body. These forms are further divided into non-Cartesian and Cartesian forms, creating four final categories as follows:


Of all of these forms, the transplantable body is the only category made reality via modern medical science. The category represents people with mechanical devices used to repair broken or missing human body parts- artificial limbs, pacemakers, etc. However, most current pop culture texts deal with the idea of the cyborg in all other forms, most specifically as an enhanced super body. When I say cyborg you probably think Terminator or Robocop, not a chick with a mechanical insulin pump for a pancreas. But the more I watch and read popular science fiction the more I feel in line with those those mythical super strength forms of cyborg- as a real-life cyborg I too am marginalize and/or a feared monstrosity. That is how disability is coded in an able-bodied world.

Unfortunately, such an awkward mix of medical marvel and human difference is rarely discussed in terms relevant to those of us occupying the boundaries of organism and machine. It took me a while to realize that this is because most authors writing about such states do not actually occupy them. They are tourist, in a way, fascinated by technology without realizing the human consequence. So, here I am, writing to you to remind you that there are consequences.