Learning Through Embodiment

In the past meeting, we talked about surgery and how some of our personal surgical experiences have affected the course of our lives. From each other, we’ve learned how being patients and changing as a result of patient status has altered our lives, informed our perspective and made us more aware of what it means to live within a human body.

Especially when we undergo a major surgery and lose function, recovery forces us to experience time differently. Disability- both temporary and permanent, thus brings us to attribute different meanings to time itself; the way we think, operate and move throughout the world gets colored through disability in its varying degree.

On Thursday, we read Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s “A Front Row Seat,” a story about the role conflict experienced by a patient-doctor protagonist who faces a loss of health. After a six-hour abdominal surgery, the patient’s stitches burst open, causing peritonitis and sepsis. The patient-doctor is forced to undergo a second (emergency) surgery in order to save their own life. The identities of patient and provider are shown grappling with one another- while one succumbs to the ailing physical body, the other grasps onto the comforts of medical language in order to make sense of her reality.

It’s a story of someone who, despite holding the medical knowledge of life, had helplessly teetered along the lines of life themselves. Life is made uncertain and immediate preoccupations shift- suddenly, survival is all that matters. And later on in recovery, what matters becomes quality of life and psychological aspects of well-being. We can recognize that when health is lost, threatening the lives that we live, the self is destined to passively watch and experience, succumbing to the body which binds.

When the protagonist awakens from surgery, she is shocked to find an open wound in her abdomen. With restored consciousness, she comes to occupy the strange state of a changed, wounded body. It’s almost ironic how surgical treatment brings about more injury- cutting into the soft flesh of the body and spilling blood in order to address existing injury and bring about the course of healing. Such is the magical paradox of surgery; we are meant to hurt even more- to suffer more trauma to the body, to even begin to heal.

The consequences of surgery are perhaps even more pronounced for the protagonist: she awakens from drug-induced unconsciousness, faced with a new physical state. We can naturally recognize the trauma that is caused by a loss of body.

“Deeply shocked, I looked down at the ruin of my abdomen.” There is a sense of panic and fear in grieving the loss of a body that once was.

“I was in despair.” And yet, even words couldn’t possibly convey the gravity of what the protagonist had survived- its residual feeling. How would I react? we might even ask ourselves.

This reality is further complicated by life-after-surgery. “Perhaps I would not die of this wound after all but would have to live with it,” the protagonist says. “How would I live with this great hole in my front? Perhaps after many years it might fill in and become flat- a scar fourteen inches long and several inches wide. Until then no tight jeans or bathing suits. Could I wear extra-large clothes? Or fill the deep trench in my belly with cotton and tape so it would not show?” Shame is apparent; quite frustratingly, the body subject to the disfigurement of surgery becomes something to be hidden.

We are brought to consider larger conversations of normalcy. Here, healing encompasses not only the physical body, but becomes a larger conversation of reintegration back into society- gauging the world’s treatment/response to the recovering patient, and considering whether that adjustment would be ameliorated with prosthesis or concealment to abate shame and judgment.

Yet, these worries subside when “day after day, [the nurse] would pull back the dressing and I would watch as this great wound, in the slow, patient way of all natural things, gradually became a hairline scar.”

The great wonders of the human body perhaps incite our own excitement and are assuring in restoring a sense of agency to the story; it is not the doctor with their medical knowledge who brings about the healing, but the patient themselves and their magical bodies. Healing is, though facilitated by practitioners, something of which is owed to the patient’s agency.

- Tabitha H.

Contributors: Kai N., Belen A., Raymond K.