Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
surgery. I went back to work after 3 months because my doctor said she
wanted me to be a productive citizen. I can't think quickly enough and
I can't see numbers correctly sometimes so I was out of balance a lot.
Finally I either had to quit or get terminated. I chose to quit.
My thought process is slow and my short term memory plays tricks
on me. I think I know what I'm doing, but I really don't. I look good,
and I act normal so everyone thinks I am normal. I'm far from it, but I
can't convince SSDI or even some family members. I'm depressed most
of the time and take medication forever.
I wish I could just be me and everyone would understand who I am.
Thats what it feels like. Like I am a total stranger in Jetty's body and
everyone thinks shes in here. Jetty as I know her is no longer in this head
and body. The Jetty I know is a good bank teller and can do anything she
wants to. I'm a healthy happy person that everyone goes to for advice.
Not this leftover piece of me, without a job and probably will never have
one. I feel so helpless.
6
This woman writes, like many of the others, that the scheduled operation
resulted in permanent after-effects of the same kind as those that sufferers
from ruptured aneurysms talk about. She hardly agrees with her doctors
that the result was successful. She took a risk in order to avoid another. Her
narrative supports the interpretation that her expectation of the operation
was to reconstruct normality, that is, to become the same person as she was
before she had the information about her aneurysm, a person without risk. But
instead of experiencing that her biographical normality was reconstructed by
the neurosurgical intervention, she is now permanently experiencing lived
illness. In many of the narratives this longstanding lived experience of illness
is described as a characteristic way of being, a way of being which, with
Toombs' words, ' incorporates such characteristics as a loss of wholeness, a
loss of certainty, a loss of control, a loss of freedom to act, and a loss of the
familiar world' (1992: 90).
Some storytellers describe their experiences as a permanent divorce
between their body and their self, or as some of them express it, between
self and mind. The woman quoted above expresses a despair that derives
from the fact that she still, several years after intervention, seems a stranger
to herself, not because her head and body seem to be different but because
her proper self was changed with the operation. Intervention in case of
a bleeding or rupturing aneurysm may save the patient's life and restore
health. But many illness narratives indicate that both preventive intervention
and the choice to wait and see may have disastrous consequences for the life
of the sufferer. Both choices may end up in chronic illness of a kind similar
to traumatic brain injury (TBI). In TBI, as David Webb has pointed out, 'the
brain-damaged person cannot readily overcome disability with the assistance
of the technological aids available to those whose handicapping condition
is physical' (1998: 541). The fact is that these illnesses that primarily affect
