Care
How often we’ve said it: Let me know if you need anything.
How seldom we are taken up on our offers.
Last week, CBC News published this article detailing the nightmare hospital visit of a teenager with a ruptured appendix. She waited twenty-nine hours in the emergency room before being admitted for surgery; in operation, doctors found her appendix had become “gangrenous.”
A distant Facebook friend of mine shared the article after waiting two hours at the Stollery Children’s Hospital for her toddler to be triaged for a potential head injury. On Facebook, her caption asserted, “…Liberal, purple, yellow, I don’t care what party, but someone has to do something!”
Meanwhile, a thirteen-billion-dollar surplus sits somewhere in the clouds above the United Conservative Party. They make no comment about the hospitals. They don’t care.
This spring, I sat for twelve hours in a Montréal emergency room for acute chest pain. My aunt waited with me. The triage nurse wore bright florals that did not reflect her attitude towards her patients. She told me I should’ve dealt with my heart problems sooner, should’ve seen a cardiologist back in Alberta.
My pain was a seven – that’s the rating I’d given the nurse. In the twelve hours we sat in emergency, my aunt left only to buy me juice, to feed the parking metre, and to hand my apartment key off to Nula, who’d offered to pop by and feed my dog. My aunt also left to speak once again with the nurse who’d admonished me upon arrival. She told the nurse my pain was a ten, not a seven, and please could something be done? Apart from a man with a bloody shirt and a broken leg, nobody in the emergency room was visibly injured. They held their nines and tens stoically, the way I held my seven. It was impossible to know, just looking at folks, what kind of care they needed, or how urgent.
My aunt bought us a phone charger, and we shared that charger with other patients whose wait times rivalled ours. When all my tests came back normal and I was discharged on the cusp of hour thirteen, my aunt drove me home, advising me to keep a journal of my symptoms, watch for patterns, and please, please call if I needed anything.
For a whole year, almost everything I wrote had something to do with care. I studied cousins of the word “care,” the word “care” in its many forms: caretaking, careless, take care, careful, care package, who cares? Prepositions played a part, too: to be cared for by someone else – a guardian, a friend – is to be placed “under” their care; to be cared for by an institution – a hospital, say – is to be “in” that hospital’s care.
Lifted straight from an essay I wrote on the ethics of care in Tracey Lindberg’s novel Birdie:
“Communities of care exist in all social and societal circles across the globe. As such, the word ‘care’ itself can be shaped to fit a variety of contexts and can be defined in innumerable ways. Often thought of as ‘women’s work’ (Bellacasa), care and caretaking rely on relations of affect to inspire growth or healing. Powys and Cuomo define care ethics as ‘...approaches to moral life and community that are grounded in virtues, practices, and knowledges associated with appropriate caring and caretaking of self and others’ (2); this definition includes such types of care as ‘...good parenting, friendship, and community membership […] that foster human development, social cooperation, and the basic foundation of all morality and ethics’ (2). […] According to Held, ‘Caring is a relation in which carer and cared-for share an interest in their mutual well-being’ (35). Birdie also posits care as an act of reciprocity, one that hinges on investment from both the care-giver and the care-taker.”
To care for my diabetic friend, I pick up her FreeStyle Libre prescription as she packs for a month-long trip to Europe; I drive her to the airport at three in the morning. To care for me, she pays for my meals every time we go out: she buys me bubble tea and High Dough, sends me a link to a folder containing all her successful grant applications. She reads the things I write.
She says: Crip futurity centres care as an act of kindness, not romantic obligation or reciprocity.
But it’s hard to stop calling things “favours” – to stop thinking of kindness as transactional.
Not even kind – necessary for human survival and joy.
In my head, guilt keeps the score.
The definition of “urgent”: calling for immediate attention.
Of “immediate”: accomplished without loss or interval of time.
We have learned that almost everything can wait. That most things shouldn’t, but can. That pain scales sit, like all else, atop a mountain of experiences unique to each human who is asked to discern where their migraine falls in relation to their divorce or that one terrible root canal. I feel no pain in my foot, but after a full day at the Medicentre, I am told it is broken. For six to eight weeks, I will be in a cast. I will not be able to drive or walk my dog.
Why is it so hard to ask for help? To accept it?
For the next six weeks, I will sit with my foot elevated while my dog chews a bone, trots a few feet to retrieve a lazy ball. I will sit outside in the mornings with my coffee, trust that somewhere inside this immobility are three separate fragments of my fifth metatarsal reaching for each other in the dark, drawing closer over the course of six to eight weeks, six to eight weeks I’ll think of as a journey for them, but for me a lost October. I will be grateful that my best friend is a physiotherapist, that I spoke the language of the doctor who explained to me which bone was broken and how long it would take to heal. I will, I will find ways to move in stasis, ways to sidestep boredom (Mom: Only boring people get bored!), ways to express gratitude…I will remember that to care for, to care about, and to take care are three separate things, but in each, help is healing.