humble ramble Vol 7: care
A few weeks ago, I travelled to Canada to visit family and enjoy a restful holiday. Fate, it seems, had other plans.
A few days into my journey, I somehow (source still unknown) developed a ‘thundercloud’ headache, out of the blue, a wee bit concerning as I don’t have a history of headaches. I had not had the occasion to visit a hospital in years and was taken aback by the volume and spectrum of humans needing urgent and immediate care in the ER. From broken limbs, sick babies and those battling psychological demons, the air in the room was motionless and heavy with a mix of fear and frustration.
Before being admitted I was asked if I had my affairs in order (my primary directive — my will). I was not ready for that question…and those that followed as I was alone with my thoughts, only the sound of the IV and nurse-call alarms bleeping. I was taken to do a CT scan and when that was clear, then a lumbar puncture (needle in the lower spine to draw cerebrospinal fluid {CSF}). It turned out I had white blood cells in my CSF (they’re not supposed to be there). I was checked into a room and started on a battery of tests, including an MRI and ECG, as well as antibiotics, anti-virals and steroids.
My headache — which thankfully dissipated soon after being admitted — turned into a week in the hospital with an IV for company. As I write this two weeks later, after finishing my course of antibiotics, there’s no clear answer as to the cause or source of my headache or the elevated level of white blood cells in my CSF.
An unexpected hospital stay will have you thinking about how we care for each other and ourselves.
I watched the nurses in the ER and the internal medicine departments navigate the intimacy and emotion of life and death and pain and suffering daily. How they relentlessly cultivate joy for themselves, their peers and patients as a means of survival, but also as a means of connection. I heard heartbreaking cries for help and mercy from neighbouring patients and was in tears wondering where the energy and love comes from to embrace such pain with such enduring tenderness despite the frequency at which it is needed. I felt embarrassed for feeling that at some point I would run out of patience, and I was only a visitor.
Surely the antibiotics, steroids and tests made my recovery possible, but equally so did the kindness, the laughter, the patience, the stories — the connection.
Even this past week, we watch summer temperatures threaten life in many places. We are now in the throws of an altered and inhospitable climate of our own creation. Alarms are ringing incessantly, as they do in the hospital, all needing care and attention. All aspects of life are becoming more vulnerable and precarious. As individuals and communities, we are being called to respond. As social and ecological disruptions are more frequent and more severe, care must be at the heart of our approach to building community and personal durability to the shocks that are to come. This means investing in relationships, investing in health care — we are going to need it. We need to let go of the illusions of an age that has ended including what I would describe as the tyranny of convenience (and its myriad of obfuscated externalities).
The pandemic has shown the failure in our approach to health care, even in the wealthiest countries (US, UK, Canada) as their fragmented and fragile systems have buckled under the strain of more than two years of Covid-19. As our health systems limp forward today, we are increasingly vulnerable to future shocks which surely to come as deforestation, industrial animal agriculture and antibiotic resistance expose us to novel pathogens with fewer defences. Now is the time to create health and community care infrastructure, to reimagine what it could look like — to serve the common good. The cost of living is only starting to spike, it will never be cheaper to take care of one another than it is right now.
In Canada and around the world we have beautiful, talented, committed humans working to take care of us when we need it. Imagine how we could flourish together if the quality of care was not arbitrarily constrained or thwarted by the mad profit motive of neoliberal capitalism?
Care as resistance, as revolution.
Care is slow and thoughtful. It is intimate and open. Care is present and engaged and attentive. In every way, care runs counter to the hegemonic practices dominating our global, financialized, extractive, exploitative world. Care is a radical, revolutionary act in a world that seeks to distract us from the very thing that will heal us. Let us give more space for this healing, it might just upend this whole rigged system.
