Tag Archives: PTSD

Recommended Reading for November 16, 2010

Peggy Orenstein for the New York Times Magazine: The code-words of breast cancer awareness

Fast-forward to today, when, especially during October, everything from toilet paper to buckets of fried chicken to the chin straps of N.F.L. players look as if they have been steeped in Pepto. If the goal was “awareness,” that has surely been met — largely, you could argue, because corporations recognized that with virtually no effort (and often minimal monetary contribution), going pink made them a lot of green.

But a funny thing happened on the way to destigmatization. The experience of actual women with cancer, women like Rollin, Black, Ford and Rockefeller — women like me — got lost. Rather than truly breaking silences, acceptable narratives of coping emerged, each tied up with a pretty pink bow.

Ally at Every Crooked Step Forward: Where I Write About (Not) Coming Out

I could have lied. But I couldn’t lie. I didn’t know asexual was anything, then, so I just said no, and then was forced to sit through all the speculation. They didn’t know, and I didn’t know enough to argue with them. People assumed I was undesirable, because of the CP, and I didn’t argue with them, though I wanted to because the assumption hurt, but the hurt was hard to explain, under the circumstances. People assumed I was too brain damaged to understand sex, and I couldn’t explain otherwise, because simply having no desire was enough to tell sexuals I didn’t understand.

Lisa at Sociological Images: Illustrating a “Normal” Life Course

By organizing birth control needs according to age, the slide show teaches viewers a socially-approved timeline for our sexual, marital, and reproductive lives.   Teen sex is invisible, having children in your 30s is ideal, and the end of a relationship is an option but, as Corina points out, not having children is not.

Wheelchair Dancer at cripwheels: Broken

Regardless of the state of Tommy’s mind and body, it is we who are broken.  It is we who drink in glorifications of war and heroism in the movies and kill the political systemic message of such poetry by treating it as individual expression.  It is we who refuse to provide support and systems of support to help our veterans; it is we who shame and silence them into a stiff upper lip.  We are the ones who both stare and look away.  Homelessness doesn’t respond to swelling music and huge parades.  PTSD isn’t best treated by ignoring it.

Crazy Mermaid at Bipolar: Crazy Mermaid’s Blog: NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness)

Unlike Breast Cancer with their irascible pink color, and Heart Disease with their “wearing red” campaign, Mental Illness doesn’t have the awareness in the public eye that those campaigns and others such as Multiple Sclerosis or other equivalent organizations.  Why is that?

David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine: Homeopathy for fibromyalgia: The Huffington Post bombs again

As you might be able to guess, because fibromyalgia is a syndrome of unclear etiology with a wide variety of physical complaints, widely varying severity, and a clinical course that waxes and wanes, it is a woo magnet. Indeed, many conditions that scientists do not yet understand well and/or for which we do not yet have particularly good treatments are woo magnets.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

Recommended Reading For 12 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Dancing With Pain: Practice entitlement. Because disability access is more than a physical issue (Thanks to livingartist for the link!)

I glared as I passed. I continued glaring as they served us. I also stopped eating, having lost my appetite (which seriously never, ever happens). My mom knew something was pissing me off, but I didn’t want to tell her what it was, so as to spare her feelings.

When I saw the bread assistant standing by himself on the other end of the patio, I got up and walked over to him. “What’s your name?” I asked. He told me. “It is in bad taste to mock disability and age,” I said evenly. “Yes ma’am,” he replied solemnly. I was impressed that he neither tried to deny his actions nor defend them. I walked back to the table.

WEEI: An Expert’s Guide to Telling When Players Fake Injuries

Look, I’m no medical expert. But I can spot a guy who’s faking an injury a mile away. I can tell a goldbricking slacker when I see one because… well, because I am one. You know that expression, “It takes a thief”? Well when it comes to stealing the company’s paid sick leave, I’m D.B. Cooper.

Alternet: Army Chaplain Tries to Cure PTSD With Jesus

In a nearly 11,000 word essay, “Spiritual Resiliency: Helping Troops Recover from Combat,” Command Chaplain Col. Donald W. Holdridge of the 200th Military Police Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, argues belief in Jesus Christ and Bible reading, particularly King David’s Psalms, can help cure a soldiers’ PTSD. “Combat vets need to know that most of these [PTSD symptoms] do fade in time, like scars,” writes Holdridge, a professor at the Baptist Bible College, as the Army Reserves banner hangs from the top of the Webpage. “They will always be there to some degree, but their intensity will fade. What will help them fade is the application of the principles of Scripture.”

Change.org’s Women’s Rights Blog: BPA in Plastic Blamed for Sparking Puberty in Seven-Year-Old Girls (Possible Trigger Warning for body shaming)

You’ve probably heard of BPA, or bisphenol-A, a chemical used in most plastics. BPA is synthetic estrogen, and since I’ve already mentioned that increased estrogen triggers early puberty, I think you can connect the dots here. So how much plastic do you use everyday? What food, hair products, drinks, make-up, or other items come in plastic containers? See how this might be a problem?

Philadelphia Daily News: Our famed forensic sculptor wryly reflects on a fading life

Thirty-three years after Bender, 69, sculpted his first bust of an unknown murder victim – a woman found near the airport in 1977 – he would seem to be at the top of his game: He fields calls daily relating to his work and is the subject of “The Murder Room,” a book that goes on sale next week, and an “America’s Most Wanted” tribute scheduled to air on Fox at 9 tonight.

But he’s dying of pleural mesothelioma; he lost his longtime wife, Jan, to nonsmoker’s lung cancer in April, and he has been forbidden to practice his craft by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is overseeing his care.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com

…And At This Point, I Don’t See It Stopping Anytime Soon

Courtesy of amandaw I bring you this stellar article that once again rubs in my face how brilliantly miserable the VA is scratching the surface of realizing what is wrong with they way they even see women veterans. If you read along carefully you can even see the lightly sugar-coated condescension artfully woven in TIME writer Laura Fitzpatrick’s story. It really is a piece of work, from the dismissive way she re-counts the testimony of the “presumed” treatment of a victim survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a medical professional (because they NEVER do THAT) down to the detailed description of the very girlie attire of the staff at the impressively mostly women-run facility in Palo Alto. I crave to read the way a man’s shoes click-clack on a hospital hall’s floors in such a manner. But it is a very cliche description etched in the halls of descriptive-writing history, INORITE, so who am I to argue with the laws of good writing. I am, after all, only an amateur.

The news isn’t that the VA is failing women veterans. I’ve known that for quite some time. Really, I have. I have encountered some of the treatment described to some degrees first-hand:

I remember having to hunt around for a toilet in an ill-fitting paper gown at my own exit screening, past several other open, occupied exam rooms. I was the only woman there. They had no sanitary napkin to offer me and it was an embarrassing scene trying to find a place where I could insert a tampon. I was fighting back tears when I finally found a (presumably) unisex bathroom.

So My Dear Friend Ms. Fitzpatrick’s dismissal of Anuradha Bhagwati’s story, the one she gave as testimony before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is ill-received. It isn’t too far-fetched for me to imagine the way she recounts “the ham-handed manner in which a male gynecologist, upon being told by a patient that she had been sexually assaulted, left the exam room and — presumably to beckon a female staff member — yelled down the hall, ‘We’ve got another one!'”. I can easily see the inept professionals at the inadequate facilities just stumbling over how to even grasp a way to provide basic courtesy to a patient who isn’t like them. And failing. Miserably.

The news here is that they seem to have no idea how to fix it, and no set, immediate time line in mind for seeing progress. Sure, Secretary of the VA, Eric K. Shinseki recently, at a forum at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, has said that he hopes to have the VA ready to serve 100% of veterans in 25 years, but what is going to happen to this generation of women veterans who are already being ignored? To the women veterans of the wars past who have been fighting for help all along already?

Because their concerns are already being swept aside. You can already see as things like their urinary-tract issues being categorized as simple “gender differences”, because women react to the desert differently. Sure, possibly. I’ve seen this intimated a few times. People looking to explain away womanly behavior in high stress situations. Oh! They didn’t want to stop the convoy! Well, why is that? Maybe because we know that women are far more likely to be killed by their fellow servicemembers than by combat in combat zones that they learned defense mechanisms, as confessed to by Col. Janis Karpinski. Women tended to drink less water, as little as they thought they could get away with, to avoid using latrines or having to stop roadside alone with men out of fear of sexual assault. And it killed some of them. If you remember, though, Karpinski was even dismissed as a woman scorned because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, anyhow, so we can’t win for losing. She was just ratting out her old boss because she got in trouble.

Some of it is true, though. Most of the VA’s 144 hospitals do not have the proper facilities to even offer privacy to non-men patients, let alone provide gynecological care, or as I mentioned above, pads. The TIME article notes a hospital in Salt Lake City which announced that it delivered its first baby this past October (the article mentions that its average patient is 78 and male), but the day after the little girl’s arrival they didn’t know how much she weighed (I cringe to think how much more they couldn’t provide) because they didn’t even have an infant scale.

Women veterans are spiking in numbers. They, funnily enough, are not the same as men. That means they are not the same as the average patient, such as that the Salt Lake City hospital are used to dealing with, and their health care with be different. Even if you line up the matching parts, the treatment for heart disease and blood pressure, to my lay knowledge, is not the same. The numbers have been growing since The Great War, and surged after we had the need to call the next one World War II. It took until 1988 for the VA to start providing even limited care to women veterans.

Today, women veterans in need of help from the VA are of an average age far younger than the average male veteran (for obvious reasons) and have different needs. They are at least twice as likely than civilian women to be homeless (with only 8 facilities in all the U.S. available to help homeless women veterans with children). They are likely to be mothers when they are. Many of them returning from combat zones — yes, combat zones, why do you ask? — are coming home to families and are more likely than their male counterparts to get divorced following combat connected tours. They are really damned likely to get asked if that is their husband’s or boyfriend’s shirt they are wearing, or asked for their husband’s social by a thoughtless agent on the phone. They are the forgotten in war. Doubly so if they served in a branch of the military that isn’t on the forefront of the public’s mind as “really the military” (as slave2tehtink has said, Aircraft carriers tend to not be zipped around by civilians, yo). Extra-specially so if you had a thinkin’ job, like “nuke” or “spook”, and your Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or Military Sexual Trauma (MST) didn’t happen “In Country” (Iraq or Afghanistan), the only sanctioned places where these things can occur, you know.

It’s frustrating as hell. And while I don’t believe that the VA is intentionally forgetting about us, I don’t believe that they are doing everything that they can to make sure that it gets better faster.

And honestly, I don’t think writers like Ms. Fitzpatrick are helping. But maybe I am jaded and have been at this for too long. But the VA needs an overhaul, stat. Pretty words from the Secretary of the VA and promises that it will be better in a couple of decades just aren’t good enough.

Recommended Reading for 06 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Belfast Telegraph: Junior sports boys and girls tap into the Olympic spirit

Kevin Murray, PE and Sport Development Officer at Queen’s Sport said: “Through Queen’s involvement in this project we hope to challenge commonly held negative attitudes about people with disabilities and to inspire and encourage more disabled and non-disabled children to become more active in sport.

The Daily Femme: Sexual Assault and PTSD in the Military

But while the access and compensation for PTSD treatment has been expanded for those men (and women) who have spent time in combat zones, receiving similar compensation for women suffering from MST-induced PTSD is much harder. For instance, the DoD only retains records of significant harassment cases for up to two years, so by the time women come home and seek PTSD treatment, those records could have been discarded.

BBC Radio 4 Programmes: Court of Protection Cost Me £50,000 [Radio programme] (Thanks to Matthew Smith for the link!)

A special court system is supposed to protect the interests of the vulnerable and the elderly. It’s appointed thousands of ‘deputies’ – or guardians – to ensure their money is properly managed. The system was reformed three years ago – but have the changes worked?

There have been allegations the system is slow, bureaucratic and open to abuse. In some cases lawyers are appointed to oversee people’s financial arrangements – and families claim they charge excessive fees. In other cases, it’s a relative who’s appointed as a deputy – but are there adequate safeguards to ensure they’re not misappropriating the money? Fran Abrams investigates cases where the system has left some vulnerable people worse off.

(Transcript is in PDF form. Apologies for that.)

Interview here.

Disability Scoop: Chemical Castration Drug Peddled As Autism Treatment

Parents who believe that excess mercury is to blame for their child’s autism are turning to yet another unproven treatment: a cancer drug that causes the body to quit making testosterone and can lead to impotence.

Disability Direct News and Events Blog: England Blind Squad Unveiled

Dennis Hodgkins, regional development manager for the English Federation of Disability Sport, said: “The chance to support an international series between England and India’s blind cricketers is for us significant, it demonstrates the commitment made by the governing body of the sport, plus other partners.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com

Recommended Reading for 22 July 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Repeating Islands: Call for Submissions:

Simone A. James Alexander and Dorsía Smith Silva are seeking submissions for an edited collection on Caribbean Mothering (to be published in Fall 2012).

This anthology will examine the diverse and complex experiences of motherhood and mothering from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective. The organizers welcome submissions that explore major cultural, political, historical, and economic factors that influence the lives of Caribbean mothers, such as migration and transnationalism. Also encouraged are writings that represent the relationships between Caribbean mothers and their children; perspectives of single Caribbean mothers; relationships of extended motherhood in Caribbean communities; and colonial, post-colonial, and modern representations of Caribbean motherhood from literary, historical, biological, sociological, political, socioeconomic, ethnic, and media perspectives. This incorporation of a variety of disciplines and methodologies will give insight to the issues on mothering within the Caribbean context and provide a space that recognizes the significance of Caribbean mothering. The aim of this volume is to foster work on mothering that integrates the disciplines of feminist ideologies, literary criticism, and cultural analysis as well as represent the diversity of the Caribbean islands and the Caribbean Diaspora.

WIRED: Danger Room: Obama Loves This Freaky PTSD Treatmen; The Pentagon, Not So Much

Concerns over risks, especially that the injection can trigger seizures, hit a key artery or puncture the lung, are valid, Lipov admits. Still, they’re rare: A 1992 study evaluating 45,000 SGB cases found adverse effects in 20 patients. And Lipov has come up with a distinct method, which he calls the “Chicago Block,” that targets the C6 vertebra rather than the traditional C7. Because C6 is farther from important arteries and the lungs, it’s less likely to be implicated in problems during an SGB procedure.

“Realistically, 1 in 100,000 people might have serious complications,” he admits. “Say we treat 300,000 veterans — that’s three people. Compare that to the military’s suicide rate.”

Online Journal: Don’t you know there’s a war going on?

For an American military already stretched to the cracking point, the human cost spreads beyond the immediate casualties of the battlefield. June was the worth month ever recorded for US Army suicides, the service reported last Thursday, with soldiers killing themselves at the rate of one per day, 32 confirmed or suspected in all. Twenty-two of them had been in combat; 10 had been deployed two to four times. What’s more, by the spring of 2009, according to The Washington Post, “The percentage of the Army’s most severely wounded troops who were suffering from PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] or traumatic brain injury had climbed to about 50 percent, from 38 percent a year earlier.”

The one bit of good news: “Senior commanders have reached a turning point,” the Post reported on Sunday. “After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield — once known as shellshock or battle fatigue — as combat wounds, not signs of weakness. [Army Vice Chief of Staff] Gen. Peter Chiarelli . . . has been especially outspoken. ‘PTSD is not a figment of someone’s imagination,’ Chiarelli lectured an auditorium of skeptical sergeants last fall. ‘It is a cruel physiological thing.’”

Sanguinity: To Kill a Mockingbird, Huck Finn, High School Curriculums, and Canon

One huge tension coming up is the ought/is problem. Yes, I think you could probably do a great lesson plan that includes [To Kill A Mockingbird] if you teach TKAM from a historiographical perspective (as one might do when studying sketchy roadside historical markers): who wrote it? when? why? why did they write it this way? what else was going on then? who did it become popular with? why? And so on. I’d also pair it with Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry to open up a discussion of other ways a similar story could be told, and differing opinions about how similar characters or situations would play out. (I cannot find the comment now, but someone pointed out that TKAM casts Tom Robinson as a minor, almost throw-away character in the story of Tom Robinson being on trial for his life!) I like Bingo’s suggestions of how to demonstrate that the issues of racism in TKAM are not ancient history, nor confined to the South. I’d also incorporate many of Larissa’s ideas about teaching Huck Finn, if I could find parallel resources to do it with TKAM (or leverage the Huck Finn resources to work with TKAM). Additionally, because TKAM and Huck Finn are both canon, I think you can have an excellent discussion of the phenomenon of canon, how canon got to be canon, what doesn’t appear in canon, how does canon shape and/or reflect society, etc. Most importantly, I would try to pull all this off so that the discussions are worthwhile for students of color — I wouldn’t want this to become the Great Race Learning Experience for the white kids, while the black kids are sitting there having to process/deflect/cope with the racism in the novel(s) but not getting anything out of it to make their stress worthwhile.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com

Recommended Reading for 19 July 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Hope Is Real: Fibromyalgia Is Not Caused By Men

I remember the invite said that the speaker thinks women have fibromyalgia, because of the stress of men not providing enough for women. This statement offends me to the core and it is just another example of patriarchial bullshit. It is not that I do not think we need each other, we do. People need people in order to survive, but I do not believe that there is one group of people who needs to care for womyn more than another. There are all kinds of communities of people who care for each other. What I take the most offense is it is the language of domination. It is not men who need to take care of womyn, but rather it is people that need to take care of people. I am not interested in someone solely taking care of me, but in being in a relationship where people take care of each other. I am interested in reciprocity

CTV News: Counsellors cite Afghan war for military domestic abuse [trigger warning for descriptions of violence]

“Our anecdotal evidence is that there is an increase in the amount of domestic violence, and in the amount of children who are seeing violence in the home.”

Many military members are now shouldering the residual stress of two, three or four tours in Afghanistan or more, Lubimiv said.

“When a soldier returns home, many have talked about feeling like strangers, not knowing where they fit. And it takes time to close that particular gap. And if there are, on top of that, mental health issues — or if there is already an issue of conflict or discontent in the couple’s relationship — then all of that gets magnified by the new experiences that they each have faced.”

Most troops will work through their issues on their own and gradually reintegrate, Lubimiv said. “But many don’t respond in that way, need additional help or haven’t been identified.”

Wisconsin State Journal: Vets cheer change on PTSD claim

The rule change will have its greatest effect on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans because so many non-combat personnel encounter roadside bombs, and because there are few places not in danger of mortar attacks or suicide bombs.

Even Wisconsin National Guard troops performing administrative jobs in Baghdad’s Green Zone were within range of mortar rounds that insurgents occasionally lobbed in blindly, said Bob Evans, the state Guard’s director of psychological health.

Most of the 3,200 members of the state Guard who had duties as prison guards or support personnel in Iraq last year underwent stress that could lead to PTSD, Evans said.

“I’ve seen people who weren’t even close to the battlefield who came down with PTSD and anxiety disorders,” Evans said.

Anishinaabekwe: We Are a Generation of Healers

We are a generation of healers because we can choose to turn the intergenerational trauma to intergenerational healing. We can start with ourselves and our families. I have been really blessed to have a family that is open and committed to healing. I know many people who have had to completely cut themselves off from their family and do healing on their own. In my healing work I have been able to reflect the inner work I have done on my family. In turn, each individual in my family can reflect the healing that they have done onto each other. I have worked in the Native community and will continue to do so. I can reflect and send the healing I have experienced in myself and in my family into the community. Healing happens in a circle.

Deeply Problematic: Wendy Garland dies after abuse and neglect from family

The death of Wendy Garland is horrific. Her abuse went unnoticed, unchecked because of ableism: societal devaluation of people with disabilities and misplaced trust in abled family members. Garland’s death is a direct result of abuse on the part of her caregivers, the people in her life that some want to canonize and position as her selfless saviors. Parents, partners, siblings and other folks taking care of persons with disabilities can be wonderful, but they are not necessarily helpful: they can hinder, they can neglect, they can abuse, they can hurt, they can kill.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com

Dear Imprudence: The Questions You Don’t Get To Ask

A concerned family member writes to Miss Manners:

Dear Miss Manners:

My brother served in Iraq a couple of years ago. He suffers from PTSD and was wounded. The physical wound is not one you can see, but people (family especially) will still ask him what it was like to fight in the war and even go so far as to ask if he killed anyone.

It never ceases to amaze me the way that people feel entitled to information about other people. They love to ask questions about your disability, and when a person happens to be a veteran and has seen combat, one of the first questions that comes up, almost without fail (unless that inquiring person happens to be a veteran or the family member/close friend of a veteran), is whether or not that particular veteran has killed some body.

Have you ever killed anyone?

I just can not fathom having to live with the reality of having lived through that burden, let alone having to deal w/ having to relive any of the emotions attached to that each time a thoughtless person asks “Have you ever killed anyone?”.

The letter writer wants to avoid having to stay away from a family function to keep zir brother safe from such carelessness from other family members, and honestly that breaks my heart. A PWD should not have to completely cut themselves off from friends, family, and other outside contacts to avoid triggering situations, but the reality is, this is overwhelmingly the way that it usually works.

I know for a fact that there are many veterans living in isolation because of PTSD, and yes, several of them are women, because of people who aren’t veterans, who can’t grasp what that must have been like (and not even all of us, as veterans can know what that is like), who can’t abstain from getting too nosy and triggering their PTSD. Why can’t we just have the same conversations as everyone else? Not everything in our lives revolves around our disabilities and our experiences in The Sandbox. Not everything is about the worst thing that has ever happened to us.

I like the way Miss Manners answers this letter:

Can you do this without creating consternation and even more curiosity about his condition?

She cautions the letter writer to caution the family to avoid the topic of war without creating a more awkward situation that might cause the family to avoid zir brother as if he is a ticking time bomb.

[He] will probably tell us about the war eventually, but right now it’s his least favorite topic, and I know he’d appreciate our staying off the subject.

This is the perfect way to describe this.

This is the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, the Forgotten War, many call it. My grandfather is a proud veteran and a Purple Heart recipient. He didn’t like to talk about the war with us, even when I was a shining eyed, curious young girl, who was almost never denied anything she asked of her grandfather. It was painful for him to remember, and the only time I ever saw him reminisce was when we traveled to Des Moines for his unit’s reunion many years ago.

But after I joined the Navy he sent me a letter at my A-School sharing a moment of understanding for what I was doing, and later, when my partner and I PSC-ed to Korea, he sat and talked to us for hours about what he remembered of the country. He told us harsh and sometimes beautiful stories of his memories. He told his of his marching from Pusan all the way to far North, of being picked up by Navy ships, transported back to Pusan and doing it again, after salvaging boots from the dead to cover their own bleeding feet. He tells it better, and I hope to get it recorded the next time I see him. But he told it to us in his own time, when it didn’t hurt him anymore.

I remember when The Kid’s Tae Kwon Do instructor told us of his memory of being a child during the war. A child in her class said that he was too young to do something or another well. The Master told us a story, of being eight, and of being held by his mother in a drainage tunnel and being told to not make a sound while North Korean soldiers ran over head. He was able to barely breathe, soundlessly, and stand against the side, like you see in movies, as they flashed their lights looking for people. He shared that story with us freely, and I remember the look on his face, as if he could still feel the chills of fear, like he was back there for a moment, but stronger now, sixty years later.

We have no right to ask them to regale us with the details of the horrible things they had to do to get by, to make a living for their families, to live, all because they were told it was the right thing to do. Or because they had to survive. They had a moment to think, but they have a lifetime to live with that decision.

People who live through wars will tell their stories when they are ready, because the pain will give them a moment of release, it will subside for a moment, or forget to pound them with the aggressive flashback or terror.

We, as people who have never lived through that, have no right to inflict that upon them.

Grey’s Anatomy Ableism: “How Insensitive”

Spoilers for Grey’s Anatomy, up and including to episode 6×21, How Insensitive.

Grey’s Anatomy, a sudsy USAn medical drama based around a Seattle surgical team, is one of those showers which I can love or hate. On the one hand, they have a cast of fabulous and complicated women – Miranda Bailey! Cristina Yang! Callie Torres! Arizona Robbins! It not only passes the Bechdel test in every episode, but the people of colour Bechdelesque test in most episodes – and, which is considerably more rare on popular television, the women of colour variant.

Disability, however, it’s not so good on. There’s a main character (Owen Hunt) with PTSD who is portrayed in fairly interesting and complex ways (though he’s a white man whose PTSD was acquired entirely “conventionally”, in battle), but as a show which is focused on experimental and heroic cures of ‘broken’ folk, there are also major issues. And the fat hate. Oh my, the fat hate.

The most recent episode swung wildly from a scene I absolutely loved, to a scene that was so full of ableism that I was barely able to get through it. So I thought I’d share.

Background: a disabled, very fat man, Bobby Corso, has been brought in to hospital with abdominal pain for investigation. Bailey has attempted to offer “sensitivity” training to the residents, who are pretty much failing across the board. The residents are sitting eating lunch together; the woman who comes in is Mrs Corso (do we even learn her first name?), who is pregnant.

Transcript:

Yang: Let’s say [picks up a skinny chip] this is the wife.

Meredith Grey (looking horrified): No! Don’t do that.

Yang: And this… is him! [picks up large hamburger, bursts out laughing]

Karev: So I won’t be eating that now.

Yang: She’s gotta be on top.

[Lexie Grey smiles.]

Karev: She’s gonna get altitude sickness. [bursts out laughing]

[Mrs Corso, a slim blonde white women, is walking past. She stops and looks at the gang.]

Lexie Grey: [notices, suddenly looks serious] Guys.

Yang [looks at Mrs Corso]: Uh. Sorry.

Mrs Corso: It’s alright. I get it. [approaches table] You’re trying to figure out how my husband and I managed to get a baby in here. [Gestures to abdomen, smiles.] There are some logistics involved. Do you want me to tell you?

[Lexie and Meredith look abashed.]

Mrs Corso: [still smiling] But first! How about you tell me how you like to do it with your husband? Or your girlfriend? Any favourite positions? Or kinks! [wide smile] Let’s talk about that! Because I know you all must have a freakshow of your own goin’ on! Who wants to go first?

[Yang and Karev look abashed.]

Mrs Corso: No. Nobody? OK. [more serious] Well it’s probably none of my damn business anyway. [long look. Walks away. All the residents look abashed.]

[Cut to Bobby Corso lying in a hospital bed. Ex-chief surgeon Dr Richard Webber is standing with Mirand Bailey by his bedside.]

Webber: The fat under your skin has become necrotic. Has – has died. And the infection is eating through your skin.

Corso: Huh [wry semi-laugh]. I suppose it had to come to that. I’ve eaten everything else.

Webber: The operation is extremely risky. You have a higher than normal chance that a surgical complication could kill you.

[Karev enters the room.]

Corso: If I don’t have the surgery – I die? [Webber and Bailey look serious.] How long will I have, do you think?

Webber: Mr Corso, you want the surgery. You want to try

Corso: I’ve tried. Everything. High protein, low carbs, drugs, pills, hypnosis. I’ve tried everything.

Bailey: You have a baby on the way. Think about that.

Corso: Who do you think I’m thinking about? You dream of having a kid. [sentimental piano/strings music starts up in the background] You picture yourself playing ball with him. You picture her standing on your feet while you dance around with her, you know? You don’t picture them bringing you food and [disgusted look] cleaning you up. I can’t walk four steps to go to the bathroom. You tell me – who deserves that guy as a father?

[Bailey and Webber look at each other, as if to say, ‘He has a point.’]

Corso: I just wanna be gone before the kid has a chance to know who I am. Don’t – tell my wife about this, ok? Just tell her it’s too risky. Let me go home.

[Mrs Corso enters.]

Bobby Corso: Hey, peanut.

Mrs Corso: What’s going on?

This video clip starts off great. Someone is finally speaking up and telling this rude, obnoxious residents exactly what is and isn’t their business when it comes to their patients’ behaviour and bodies. She’s rocking my world!

But then, it all comes crashing down, with the treatment of Bobby Corso’s disability. I felt like his little speech reflected the ideas of the writers: If you can’t walk and dance, if you can’t independently wash your own body, no child ‘deserves’ you as a parent, and you don’t deserve to be a parent. Especially when your disability is, in society’s fucked-up opinion, your own damn fault. It’s only sensible to think that you’d be better off dead, that your children would be better off never knowing you. The tragedy is not your acute infection and your possible impending death, but your very existence. Doctors understand this, though they may go through the motions of challenging it (in paternalistic ways that include telling you what you ‘want’).

There’s a further rage-inducing scene where Mrs Corso scolds Karev, saying “You don’t know that inside all that is the same man I’ve always known”. I think the writers are making it clear, again, that like so many people in our culture, they don’t see fat people and disabled people as full humans at all. They want to believe that there’s a “real person inside”, meaning a thin abled person; while the actual person, the actual body, is a facade that can be dismissed and pushed aside in disgust. Disabled bodies are not real. Not authentic. They don’t really count, and we’d rather not think about them. The only way some people can value PWD as humans beings is to pretend that “beneath” their disability, there is some other person that doesn’t make the person with the abled gaze feel uncomfortable. With this cognitive sleight-of-hand, abled folk get to pretend that they’re oh-so-terribly accepting and magnanimous, while lovingly maintaining the care and feeding of their disgust and hatred of the disabled body.

Later in the show Karev abandons his sensitivity training and yells at Corso, calling him selfish for planning to “leave a 700-pound mess for your wife to clean up”. Corso has surgery and survives the operation, in which he is serendipitously found to have a perforated diverticular abscess on his bowel; his presenting abdominal pain had been misdiagnosed as being due to his subcutaneous infection. He pledges, with the badgering of his doctors, to diet. The take-home message? The only way someone who can’t walk or clean themselves could reasonably be a parent is if they go to strenuous efforts to cure themselves, and succeed, first.

An aside-ish sort of a question: Can anyone think of any TV shows or movies (or books, if you like) which pass a disability Bechdelesque test?

1. It has to have at least two people with disabilities in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides an abled person.

Or please feel free to discuss the clip and the issues raised in it.

For Cereal, Jessica at Jezebel? PTSD after obstetric assault is “hysterical”?

[WARNING: descriptions of obstetric rape and PTSD]

At Jezebel, Jessica writes: Is Having A Baby A Traumatic Event?

A new survey says that 9% of postpartum women suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. You know, the same disorder that Iraq vets and plane crash survivors get. Something does not compute here,[…]

Have we become so precious and hyper-conscious that something women have been doing for time immemorial is now ranked alongside war as a painful event?[…]

Certainly, having a bowling ball of a baby shooting out your vag isn’t a picnic for anyone, but the hysteria surrounding something so matter-of-fact is troubling.

“Hysteria”. Yes, “hysteria”. She went there. She used the prime misogynist slam against women, blaming wandering uteruses. Unbefuckingllievable.

I’m only surprised there wasn’t a “princess” or a “delicate flower” thrown in there too. Or maybe a few accusations of insurance fraud, hm? That would just put the icing on the hateful cake.

Get back to me when you’ve been stripped, dehumanised, isolated, forcibly starved, and strapped to a table for 12 or more hours during the hardest work of your life. Get back to me when you’ve been subjected to a series of non-emergency procedures on your body with neither consent nor medical justification. Get back to me when you’ve been imprisoned in hospital.

Get back to me when you’ve been held down by two or three people while someone – or more than one someone – pushes their fingers into your vagina while you say “No”. Get back to me when you’ve been screaming “NOOOO! STOP!!!” and been ignored while someone cuts your body open and shoves metal forceps into you. Get back to me when you’ve been strapped to a table and operated on and had your protestations about the anaesthetic not working being ignored. Get back to me when you’re left bleeding and vomiting on a table, without access to help, wondering if you’re bleeding to death, and you’ve had your newborn baby taken away from you without explanation or good reason except an over-the-shoulder “we don’t have enough staff right now”.

Get back to me when you’ve spent months of your life – the months you thought would be a joyful, perhaps sleep-deprived, milky daze – having violent flashbacks and nightmares. Shambling through the day barely able to function, unable to bond with your newborn. Bursting into tears and panic attacks many times a day. Avoiding public places lest you suddenly start sobbing and need to run. Not able to have anyone touch you.

Get back to me when you’re hunched in a corner, unable to work, unable to care for yourself, unable to speak, and all anyone can say to you is “All that matters is a live baby”.

I hope you never experience these things. Because they can be horrifying, life-changing, deeply traumatic events. The only promise I can make you is that I won’t call you “precious” or “hysterical” if you’re ever in this terrible position.

Medical assault is assault. Obstetric rape is rape. Trauma is trauma. Some people who have experienced these things get PTSD.

And it’s not up to you, or anyone else, to instruct them that they haven’t – especially in explicitly woman-hating terms.

You don’t get to judge.

No, no, no, no, no.

Recommended Reading for October 26

Linkblurt: We Are Immobilised

A disabled college student is having trouble getting around campus, after someone stole his motorized wheelchair. […] Horus had locked it up and left it charging overnight. When he returned to campus, it was gone – all that was left was the charger. […] Horus’ wheelchair cost about $5,000 and that means whoever stole it faces grand theft charges.

“It’s really difficult for me to replace it. To replace it, it would take me like a year,” Horus said.

Health Care is an anti-racist issue [US]:

See, I’m one of the 25 million Americans who are underinsured. I have health insurance — pay $350/month for it — as part of a new policy that I switched to back in January when I quit my 9 to 5 to become a freelancer/fulltime writer for awhile. I’m pretty healthy and only in my thirties, but I have a family history of fibroids (like 50% of black women). So every year when I get my annual physical, I also get an ultrasound to check for those. This year the test showed small fibroids — too small to worry about, really, not even requiring treatment, though I need to keep an eye on them in case they grow. No biggie, I thought; my doctor’s efforts at preventative care had done what they were supposed to do, and detected a potential problem early enough that I can fix it easily if necessary. Health care at its best.

When two whole cakes ain’t enough arsenal…

I was leaning against a sign that read “Bus Stops Here” and jamming to some Dresden Dolls, my trusty guide dog sitting politely at my left leg. He laid down impatiently as the minute hands ticked and still no bus in sight. Then, out of what most docs wouldn’t call peripheral vision I spotted a figure stooping for a pet-by.

What is a pet-by, you ask? It’s when a knowing pedestrian sneaks in a pet or smooch or otherwise grossly boundaries-crossing form of affection at an unsuspecting service animal. Not to be mistaken with human grabbings or other forms of harassment but nonetheless devious and irritating for both animal and human handler.

Without missing a beat and sans usual snark I said loud enough for passerby to hear that “that was a shitty thing to do.” There, I said it. That was a shitty thing for person to do. Ask first, respect my answer, move on. Clearly knowing petting wasn’t allowed, ze sneaked on by, hoping I wouldn’t notice. Too bad my dog alerts me, not liking unknown human touch too much.

Where Neurodiversity Meets Feminist Theory: Part I, Part II, Part III:

Another area I see feminism and disability-rights perspectives reinforcing each other is on the question of caregiving. This might not seem like an obvious choice, since you often see feminists and disabled self-advocates at odds over this issue: when disabled people assert our right to adequate care in our own homes (or wherever we choose), feminists argue that we are also claiming entitlement to the underpaid or unpaid labor of women. (See the feminist blogswarm over Ashley X for ample evidence of this conflict).

But when you think about it, modern industrial capitalist society’s way of dealing with children, disabled people, elderly adults and every other group that needs help with daily tasks is exactly what you’d expect from a society in which women are invisible second-class citizens. When women are not valued as highly as men, women’s work is not regarded as real work, and obligations that fall under the umbrella of “women’s work” (say, care for the old, the sick and the disabled) will be more likely to be dismissed as “family responsibilities” in which government meddling is unwarranted.

Post-Trauma.net is “here to help you access information about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and related mental health information.” They have a list of resources available.