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INJURY
A question for all the able-bodied people out there: Have you ever had the experience of a sudden and unexpected injury? If not, congratulations on your amazing run of luck, but I presume you have; it’s a fairly common human experience.
It’s part of having a body.
A question for all the able-bodied people out there: Have you ever had the experience of a sudden and unexpected injury? If not, congratulations on your amazing run of luck, but I presume you have; it’s a fairly common human experience.
It’s part of having a body.
A question: Did you choose to make yourself aware of your injury? Or did awareness come naturally? Were you given a choice to not know?
A silly question. You didn't choose to know. You couldn't ignore the demand of the report. You had the experience of the injury. You knew it.
A silly question. You didn't choose to know. You couldn't ignore the demand of the report. You had the experience of the injury. You knew it.
And did other people become aware of this injury? I’d assume so, if it was bad enough that you found it worth commenting on, or even screaming about. And they probably asked you questions like this:
Are you OK?
How bad is it?
What’s wrong?
Where does it hurt?
How can I help?
Are you OK?
How bad is it?
What’s wrong?
Where does it hurt?
How can I help?
And by asking, they gained knowledge about your injury, and how best to assist you, if you required assistance.
By asking, you knew they cared you had been injured.
By assisting, you knew they wanted to assist.
By asking, you knew they cared you had been injured.
By assisting, you knew they wanted to assist.
If they hadn’t asked, you’d have to assume they don’t want to know. If your injury required assistance, and they didn’t listen to you, you’ll have to assume they didn’t want to assist. You might not trust them to help you next time.
Is this obvious? It seems obvious.
Is this obvious? It seems obvious.
And, if the injury was bad enough, the assistance might have involved somebody with medical training—an EMT, doctor, nurse, medic—who asked questions with wording more clinical, but which meant the same things:
What is it?
How bad is it?
Where does it hurt?
How can I help?
What is it?
How bad is it?
Where does it hurt?
How can I help?
And new things can be learned by a practiced examination. But no matter how knowledgeable the examiner, they'll only gain complete knowledge by listening to you. And, no matter how much they learn from you about your injury, they'll never have the same knowledge of it as you.
There’s knowledge about an injury. And then there’s the knowledge of the injured.
Two separate things.
Two separate things.
Suppose your injury was deliberately caused by somebody, and none of your friends came to help, or asked you what was wrong.
Suppose you sought medical attention, and those trained to provide it refused to listen to you about what the problem was.
What would you conclude?
Suppose you sought medical attention, and those trained to provide it refused to listen to you about what the problem was.
What would you conclude?
Suppose your friends instead asked you why you had chosen to be injured.
You’d suspect your friends weren’t interested in helping you.
If this sequence of events happened repeatedly, you’d eventually have to conclude that your friends were aligned with those injuring you.
You’d suspect your friends weren’t interested in helping you.
If this sequence of events happened repeatedly, you’d eventually have to conclude that your friends were aligned with those injuring you.
What if, when the ambulance arrived, the EMTs first asked you to prove you were injured? What if they wanted you to convince them that the bone was sticking out of your skin was an injury?
You'd stop trusting that these EMTs were interested in helping you.
You'd stop trusting that these EMTs were interested in helping you.
Or what about this: what if the hospital first asked lots of questions to insure that you were worthy of care, to determine if you had earned treatment? What would you think of the whole system?
What I like about the injury metaphor is, at some point it stops being a metaphor.
What I like about the injury metaphor is, at some point it stops being a metaphor.
An injury is an interesting thing. You don’t choose it, but you have it all the same. You can’t choose to not know about it. Nobody uninjured understands the experience of it unless they listen to you tell it, and you know it in a way only shared by those who share that injury.
There’s knowledge about an injury. And then there’s the knowledge of the injured.
For an injured person, talking about their injury on the level of true understanding requires somebody who had the same injury.
For an injured person, talking about their injury on the level of true understanding requires somebody who had the same injury.
There’s knowledge about an injury. And then there’s the knowledge of the injured.
For an uninjured person, learning about the actual experience of the injury requires a willingness to listen to somebody so injured.
How interesting.
For an uninjured person, learning about the actual experience of the injury requires a willingness to listen to somebody so injured.
How interesting.
I suspect those of us with disabilities understand this dynamic at a deeper level than those of us who have merely experienced a sudden and unexpected injury. Perhaps they understand at a more basic and structural level the price that inevitably comes with having a body.
And of course we all have bodies, and so we will all have disabilities, provided we’re lucky enough to live long enough for that inevitability to find us.
Thus, we could learn something valuable by talking to people who have disabilities.
This, too, seems fairly obvious
Thus, we could learn something valuable by talking to people who have disabilities.
This, too, seems fairly obvious
Fixing the thread. https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1276501352798093312?s=20
