thoughts- a free write

Solving disease or solving me?  I'm not looking for a cure.  I read an article today on House M.D. called "The Afterbirth of the Clinic: a Foucauldian perspective on 'House M.D.' and American medicine in the 21st century."  Modernist healers approach disease like a mystery to be solved objectively-- distance yourself from the suffering.  House spending as little time with the patients as possible.

In the absence of a cure, can't I ask just for a bit of respect?  The exhaustion of having one's intelligence questioned-- what sort of idiot believes she can heal long-term muscle damage through Qigong?

Philoctetes lost in exile, marooned on Lemnos with a snakebite wound.  Left because of throbbing foot.  You'll be back, come to get my bow.  I had sympathy for Heracles.

The thing about House is, he knows pain.  We all know pain, that's true- thus the noble truth of suffering.  Dukkha.  But continuous pain, how can I accept this pain if I don't believe it has made me more empathetic? 

The finale, it haunts me.  Knowing that such pain and pain-related sadness would come to pass, who wouldn't wish for an alternative?  House wishes he'd chosen amputation.  Oh, if only the pain weren't in my neck.  Even then, haven't I considered it?

These hells. It is easier to call it myth than to consider Sisyphus rolling his boulder up and up and up always knowing it will roll back down, his back constantly aching.  Prometheus, loving soul, his liver consumed daily, all for stealing fire.  I imagine his children were freezing.  Atlas carries the burden of the world on his literal shoulders.

For eternity.  It makes me consider whether or not this pain will follow me when I "shuffle[..] off this mortal coil." 

Anyway, no more free writing for me.  It just loops around too strangely.  Let us blame my new medicines- meloxicam and neurotin.  Oy.

Works Cited

Rich, Leigh, et al. "The Afterbirth of the Clinic: a Foucauldian perspective on 'House M.D.' and American medicine in the 21st century." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 51.2 (spring 2008): 220-237.

Sophocles. Philoctetes. Trans. Carl Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2003.