Reading the Text of an Illness: An Example
"To give you an idea of what I mean, here's the story of someone whose experience became a meaningful text for her. (The stories in this book are being used with permission, though I've changed the names.) Alice's illness required weekly blood tests for some months, and she began to dread them. Her veins were hard to find and she encountered the moment of 'just a little stick' with great trepidation. Inevitably the technician would miss the vein, and things would go from bad to worse.
"One day, her arm blue and purple from her latest test, Alice visited a friend who was in cancer treatment. He rolled up his sleeve to show her his own purpled arm. At that moment, Alice realized she was part of a community, a hidden community of those who have difficulty with blood tests. That small moment made a big difference in her life. Her arm and her friend's arm bore something that looked like tribal markings. They bore the signs, in their flesh, of the ongoing wounding that allowed them to continue living.
"Alice discovered that other people's experiences with blood tests could help her with her own. A nurse told her that getting nervous increased her adrenalin, which made the veins shrink even more. The realization that her very blood vessels were shrinking from being poked helped Alice see the humorous side of the situation. Her own anxiety was one of the problems, and she could do something to control that. As she remembered her friend's rolled-up sleeve and wounded arm, her prayer became 'By our wounds we are healed.' She needed the blood tests to maintain some degree of health, and she began to see those tests, and the wounding they caused, as a form of healing, a necessary part of her own participation in the process of living with her illness. She also began to speak up, to tell the technicians that she had especially small veins that a well-practiced technician would handle easily. She saw herself as a partner with Christ in the process of healing that these tests brought about.
"For Alice, the first step to living well with her illness was taking the time to pay attention to her experience and reading the text of her purple arm. Then she began to reflect on that experience. In her prayers she held the image of her friend's wounded arm alongside her own. She learned to listen deeply to the image. She sketched the two arms in her journal, using colors to draw in the veins and the bruising. In so doing, she started learning to live with the illness and its treatment in a new way. Outwardly, not much changed. Alice still had to have the regular tests. But she had a different way of reading her own experience and using that knowledge to live more fully."
