Sick Read Online Free PDF

a year to be safe. Of course when you’re young, health never seems important until you get sick, but it’s never too late to start caring. It happened to me. It can happen to you. It’s happened to a lot of us already. Have fun, be free, be happy, but also take care. We are not as invincible as we think.

THE INVISIBLE WITNESS
EMILY KLAMER
    As a person living with degenerative disc disease (DDD), scoliosis, and supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), my curvatures, arrhythmias, and disintegrations have been mapped out, illuminated, diagnosed, and cemented in both my medical records and self-identity. While I’ve been living with scoliosis and SVT (a heart rhythm disorder caused by an extra electrical pathway in my heart, like a short circuit) ever since I was in grade school, an acute episode of sudden excruciating back pain in January of 2007 that left me unable to stand or sit up for days catapulted me into the world of constantly navigating the medical system and living with chronic pain and spinal instability. While these physical problems have increasingly become more salient features of my identity over the past couple of years, because my illnesses/disabilities are invisible and my body appears to be healthy and able (most of the time), I struggle with negotiating the practice of self-identification. Since I don’t fit into the prototypical mold of what disability has been constructed to mean in this culture and because I can “pass” as an able bodied person, I often feel unworthy identifying as dis/abled.
    Furthermore, degenerative disc disease is a misnomer. DDD isn’t actually a disease; it is a condition in which the jelly-like, fluid-filled discs in between the vertebrae break down. It is even seen as a normal repercussion of aging, a type of “ordinary” disability. Yet, diagnosed at 18, the DDD eating away at my spine can be seen as quite the oddity. I am always the youngest person in my orthopedist’s waiting room, and the disbelieving chorus of “But you’re too
young!”
haunts my medical visits and experience of living with DDD. My prematurely geriatric spine acts as a harbinger of the processes that constrain and plague the body as it ages. Seen as ordinary among the elderly, degenerative disc disease functions as an extraordinary anomaly among the young.
    My body consequently embodies the lurking threat of illness and disability that is so feared in our culture. In a culture that attempts to obsessively control our bodies, ill and dis/abled bodies represent an unruly deviation from the norm. Our ill and dis/abled bodies are literal embodiments of our culture’s insecurity regarding the mortality and imperfectness of the human body, and are therefore hidden and rendered “private” matters. Ill and dis/abled bodies also disturb the western and capitalistic value of the self-sufficient, autonomous, productive body, and are therefore relegated to the margins of society, our inhabited transgressions smothered and stigmatized.I feel as if I occupy a liminal space along the continuum of ability and well/illness. While my body appears to be able and healthy, living with my multiple diagnoses has required constant negotiation and treatment. Due to their invisibility, it’s hard for me to feel validated about the extent to which my chronic back pain and lurking threat of an SVT episode, during which my heart rate skyrockets up to 250 beats a minute and my chest becomes so tight I need to sit down, have changed my life and self-identity. Nowadays, even the most mundane routines (such as grocery shopping and sitting through class) are undertaken with a vigilant self-consciousness. I have become increasingly aware of how our society and its structures are constructed according to a bodily norm (healthy, young, non-disabled, male) that most of us don’t, or will not, fit into at some point in our lives. Straddling both sides of the ability/wellness