My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert

Author:Sandra Gail Lambert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

THIS IS ABOUT SAVING MY LIFE

Invalicide. The murder of the invalid. Say it with an emphasis on the second syllable: in-valid—the not valid person. From a young age I somehow knew Eskimos (as all the native peoples of Alaska were then called by us white children), for the good of society, put disabled people like me out on ice floes to die. I don’t remember ever not knowing this. Now I know that it was an old practice and only some groups did this and not that often. Still, the information resonated in my child mind. Already I understood the culture I lived in and often emulated, with its heroes of hearty white frontiersmen and the self-made rich, was a danger to me. So I grew up to be a productive citizen, a good girl, anything not to be ice floe material or the first killed in an apocalypse—zombie, robot, climate change, or nuclear. And as a child, I read everything available to me about the Holocaust. I am not Jewish. Later, of course, I learned of the Third Reich’s Aktion T4 campaign that used doctors to murder hundreds of thousands of disabled people, their own citizens, but as a kid the tug of connection was not understood, but nevertheless profound. This early construction of my worldview was reinforced over the decades and underpins interactions with the medical world. It likely underpins everything.

My non-physically-disabled spouse has heard “the talk” from me before. Not long ago I had breast cancer surgery. I said if things got complicated, Pam had to be careful. After years of pretending to be siblings, parents, or even the children of our hospitalized loved ones in order to be at their bedsides, we old queers can become giddy from the rightful respect we are now sometimes offered. We forget ourselves. I told Pam that if they tried to get her out in the hall for a private conversation, no matter how concerned or caring everyone was, she had to not let that happen. Instead, she must usher them back to my bedside and make them talk to me directly. I appreciated that despite my dictatorial manner in telling her what she must, should, and had to do, Pam listened without showing concern that I was unduly paranoid. I was ready to pounce on an eye roll or slight smile, but it didn’t happen. Despite this, I knew she and I didn’t understand the dangers in the same way.

Bill Peace wrote the essay “Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood.” He was a wheelchair-using white disability activist and scholar and the author of the Bad Cripple website. The essay is about the time he was hospitalized with a dangerous pressure sore. In the middle of the night, after his family had gone home, a “comfort care” team of medical staff he’d never met showed up in his hospital room and offered to help him die. For many years he never told anyone about that doctor, the one who’d sent

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