“omg you people can’t do anything”: notes on chronic illness

i was the youngest patient waiting in st. thomas’ hospital endoscopy unit that morning, three days after christmas, an emergency sunday booking. my mother, who knitted beside me, was the second youngest. after donning a hospital gown that would disintegrate in a light breeze, i sat alone in the second waiting room with my leopard print slippers. at this point, i had not had food for nearly twenty-eight hours, and my last sip of water was seven hours ago. they hadn’t even deployed the fentanyl drip yet, but i felt high. i started to cry without knowing why, and sent lucía selfies of my heinous hospital drip and intravenous cannula. she made sure to comfort me with many a picture of kush the kitty, and instructed me to throw my younger brother at my older brother, which was incredibly helpful. then i was stowing my phone and slippers below the bed, four of us in the small room, and god above, there were so many wires. someone gave me banana-flavoured numbing spray for my throat that tasted a whole lot like pure absinthe, and i was pushed and pulled and straightened out for the first endoscopy.

less than a month before the Scary Procedures (the bite of ‘87, if you will), my test results had returned abnormal and i was placed on an urgent suspected cancer pathway for colon cancer. i am not exactly a stranger to chronic illnesses, but up until this point, i had been branded with a big fat question mark on what exactly i suffered from. this was no longer a question of making accommodations for strange symptoms and chronic pain, but a quick escalation into pre-surgical triage and colonoscopy preparation appointments. it was christmas time, and i was in a state of muddled confusion. to downplay the Happenings was silly, and a little performative – double colonoscopies and gastroscopies at 21 are not exactly commonplace. but to take it seriously and soberly felt like an acceptance of what was, at that point, unknowable and terrifying. it also implied a tinge of guilt. i was not yet labelled with any diagnosis, and i felt like to worry about it was dramatic and sympathy-seeking. yes, it’s a little stupid. especially as i had suffered the same alarming symptoms a year before. now i know there is no mass in my colon, it provides a small sense of relief. still waiting on my small intestine MRI, though, so watch this space.

of course, the physical manifestations of my mystery illness have had a significant impact on my life. however, i do believe that experiencing such a swiftly alarming Horror had a more potent effect on my way of thinking than anything else. instead of being preoccupied with essays on the Alienfranchise and surveillance, i spent a lot of time reorienting my body in my world; there was a newfound awareness of its fragility, i think. it was the recognition, within myself, that something was wrong and i hadn’t been overreacting in thinking so. now, being referred back to hospital for further investigation, there is still no clarity as to what’s actually cooking inside there, if you know what i mean. it is hard, sometimes, to admit that you need help and that you are sick, and i realised i had been chastising myself for my fatigue instead of believing myself.

but this kind of reflection on the body hasn’t just been limited to myself. yep, you guessed it, i’m pivoting into the political. why is it that images of illness and suffering are so easily swept aside in places like Palestine, or Sudan, or Iran, or Lebanon? Naomi Klein refers to locations like these in Doppelgänger as the ‘Shadow Lands’, the understory of the gleaming capitalist dream. crucially, she underlines the fact that these spaces of exploitation, brutality, and even genocideare not random one-offs: “not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run”. i sometimes struggle to grasp how and why this is dismissed in favour of “oh, i’m not into politics”, when the UK government has played such a heinous role in the Palestinian genocide, for example – perhaps it is simple when it is limited to a phone screen documenting atrocities from far, far away. does it not upset you to see 22-year-old activist Umer Khalid unable to walk, refused bail, and denied medical care for his muscular dystrophy? all while imprisoned in Shepherd’s Bush? how much closer can it get for people to care? while i may require a lot of medical intervention to remedy my condition, i have access to it, but others cannot say the same: the global suffering we see without access to free healthcare should not be something to be complacent about (magically even if it doesn’t directly affect you!), be angrier.