In my immediate close circles, 2013 has been a year
highlighted by loss, illness and injury; I myself was involved in a motorbike
accident which has impacted on my life, the life of those around me and of
course how I feel about myself. I have a medical file that lists all interventions
carried out on me and I have nothing but praise for the medical team that
attended to me. But when I read the medical file, full of phrases such as
Tibia, tissue, crushing, skin graft, I struggle to relate these phrases to the
lived experience of the hospital and my injury.
Let me explain; before the injury I was blissfully
unaware of my body, my body was what my body did. That is to say I was aware of
its essence, but not its existence. The same as the essence of a hammer is to
hammer, the essence of my body was to experience the world and it did it very
well, often without me even being aware of its existence.
Jean Paul Sartre referred to this as the subjective
body of which we are unaware and used an analogy to describe the sensation.
Imagine walking in the mountains alone surrounded by nothing but nature, we
live this experience unaware of our body and how we are in space and time. Now
imagine suddenly in the distance you seeing a speck of what seems like another
person coming towards you, your perception shifts and you become aware of the
existence of yourself and your body, our body changes from unconsciously subjective
to consciously objective as we become aware of an objective, embodied version
of US. This is the objective self that others see and interact with.
As the car ploughed into me, my consciousness of my
body changed from blissfully unconscious to painfully conscious and from that
moment on my body became an object, a disempowered objective body in the hands
of “the experts”.
From this moment on my body became something to test,
probe, examine and judge; It was found wanting and the shame made me want to
disassociate myself from THIS BODY which is not mine. This body exists and has
crutches incorporated into it and when a nurse casually moves them, it feels
like a violation of my body. Through intentionality I become only too aware of
its shortfalls; reaching, getting up, shitting, pissing and masturbating are
all intentions frustrated by an object body.
My awareness of its “in space feeling” becomes heightened,
where I am in the room, what is to my left, to my right, in front or behind all
become of extreme importance.
Although the doctors explained what they were doing at
all times, I don’t experience my body as tissue, nerves and tendons. Luckily I
know my foot, as we’ve been introduced and this goes some way to helping make
sense of my injury. But I wonder what sense would I make of a lung cancer,
where I don’t know my lung or multiple sclerosis where being told that axioms
in the central nervous system do not have adequate myelin insulation. How could
I make sense of that?
In my opinion western medicine falls short of helping
us make sense of a perceptual shift towards our own body and how we make sense
of our illness. Medicine in general takes an anatomicopathalogical view and
takes illness and disease from the domain of individual subjective lived
experience and places it firmly in the physical world. This focus encourages
acute care, rescue and repair, waging wars on disease and prolonging biological
life at all costs.
Could it be that disease has been so objectified that “sick
people” have drifted into insignificance?
