Chronic denial: When making change means saying the whole truth
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Chronic denial: When making change means saying the whole truth
Margaret E. Boyle Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA.
Abstract Through a personal exploration of disability as experience, this essay explores the navigation of confession and its ramifications and relevance for scholarly work. Attending to confession in an early modern Spanish context (with focus on Miguel de Cervantes and Teresa de A´vila) as well as the contemporary moment, the essay creates a critical space for exploring how confession connects to narrative building. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 189–194. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00167-8
I have never been bold enough to begin. […] May it lead my confessors to know me better. ´ vila (1515–82) – Teresa of A
Disability Studies is not only about theory or research, but it is about lives, how we live, and how we relate with one another. – Akemi Nishida (2019)
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 189–194
Boyle
Part One: Confession My Mom is a Type I diabetic. I played with Barbies and knew how to respond when they had insulin reactions. If I turn on my childhood reel of daily memories, I see my Mom injecting insulin in the car (tough and easy, through her jeans), testing her blood sugar and licking her finger, digging through her purse to find glucose tabs, or sending me to search in the back of the fridge for a Coke right now. I watched her get a pump, argued (still argue) with her about getting continuous blood sugar monitoring (I don’t want to feel like a machine). I see the bruises on her abdomen, the callouses on her fingers, her misshapen foot. I try to track the dips and steady pace of the collection of diseases that follow her around like my needy siblings: kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetic retinopathy, gastroparesis, neuropathy, and Charcot foot. These days she doesn’t leave the house on her own. But I’m fine, she says. Five years ago, I had emergency brain surgery following a stroke caused by a rare malformation in my brainstem (Kolata, 2017). One morning, I dropped off my toddler at daycare, taught a session of intermediate Spanish with a terrible headache, and, that night, found myself transported from doctor’s office to local ER to neurological ICU paralyzed on the left side, with double vision and immense pain. Fast forward to three weeks after emergency brain surgery: having successfully removed the malformation, I was re-learning how to skip. Seven months later, I was back as a professor in the classroom. I recovered, I survived, I am thriving. And my life is almost as it was before except the right side of my face is numb, I have motion sickness and visual migraines, and I keep finding myself getting worked up about disability with a crooning, loopy themesong it could happen to you. In filling out intake forms for the numerous doctor appointments following my surgery, I collect
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