Saturday, October 04, 2008

Dear diary: Life gets in the way of learning; i need my head read

My mum has been in and out and in and out; and in and out and in and out; and in and out and in and out of hospital. That's accurate. This many times in the last 5 weeks. She has a cigarette induced lack of oxygenation, plus a disinterest in whats happening that adds up to a significant amount of being confused. But at the beginning of this week she almost died.
She has been having significant nose bleeds.
Really significant ones.
This is horrible.

Annenarie Mol is right, the experience of health and of healthcare is multiple.
Mum thinks she's fine, she wants to be at home.
The hospital is happy to discharge her, afterall, she wants to go home and in NZ at least there is no compulsion to provide care.
My experience of this part of my world is different again. I know she is not well, she asks me where my other daughter is. I only have one. She is hypoxic and also in acute nicotene withdrawal again, she is grumpy. So am I.

And to further quote annemarie mol;

Here you will not find sentences such as; we cannot imagine what it must be like to have a chronic disease. Such sentences are nasty! They do not state explicitly the author and reader are in good health , but they imply it all the same. This is not what i am after. On the contrary i want to avoid unmarked normality. To presume that you and i are healthy would go against the soul of what i seek to say. Within the logic of choice 'disease' is a strange exception, it has nothing to do with 'us', while the logic of care starts out from the fleshiness and fragility of life. I hold that dear. Indeed in articulating the logic of care i seek to contribute to theoretical repertoires that no longer marginalise, but face disease, As part of this it is good to underline that 'patient' and 'philosopher' are by no means mutually exclusive categories. 'I' am not immortal or immune to disease. And your normality , dear reader, is not presupposed here either.... i kindly invite you in to imagine yourself involved in the situations described."


While I feel that I have not paid enough attention to my day job this week, and have not done as much on my doctorate as I want to either, and combining this with my time in CCK08 plummeting and a rewrite for the ascilite conference and the moodle dse forum on hold...I am left wondering about my own normality!
Nonetheless: I did one interview for the PhD, and had a cafe breakfast reading Bruno Latour's Society is technology made durable; some excellent insights growing on the descriptive detail of actants and actant substitutions, and tracing of trajectories of actants, and of translations...
I suspect any 'normal' person would tell me to get a life!

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