Cecilia Dougherty
2025
I’m a person with a lifelong chronic illness and I know what it means to have to visit the doctor’s office a lot. Frequent check-ups, lab tests, MRIs, CT scans, IV drips, shots, specialists, x-rays, more x-rays, prescriptions (too many), knee and ankle supports, wrist splints, injections. That’s been my experience for most of my life. But everybody has something going on and everyone needs care. You don’t have to have a disability to want to be healed. And if you are disabled, then good luck to you because healing is a long game. It begins in the waiting room of the doctor’s office or hospital clinic.
Everyone needs healthcare. One American president was determined to rob people of healthcare as greedy cowardly enablers determined to let him. Decades later, another president opened the door to healthcare to many more Americans. It’s always up for debate and we, as a country, are not even ashamed to debate on what should be a basic human right rather than a privilege or a commodity. A body needs to be able to live well and if someone knows how to make that happen, it should happen.
But once you clear the waiting room, you get to wait some more and have a view to what’s down the hall or behind the doors or around the corner. Not exactly relaxing.
It’s been harder to see a doctor since COVID-19 hit us. I’ve avoided treatment and have been hoping nothing new will crop up. I don’t want to go to the hospital and I don’t want to sit in the waiting room and I don’t want to touch anything at all or breathe the air or have a nurse put a needle in my arm. A sad little balancing act. It will be alright. My risk of COVID is the same as other New Yorkers who take it seriously and understand the precautions. But chronic illness makes me more careful, more aware, more cautious, paranoid.
Finally you get to see the doctor.
Well, I go off on a tangent. I am sick of going to the doctor’s, the hospital, the pharmacy, the medical center, the lab, the specialist across town, the emergency room. But I’ve been doing it for decades and have always taken pictures of the places I go for various appointments for tests and treatment. The places of disability and illness.
When I’m there I see patterns forming: colors, shapes, surfaces, a mixture of random elements with medical machines and supplies; waiting rooms, instructional signage, terrible artwork and uninspiring posters, a general blandness of colors meant to suppress the anxiety of being there in the first place. Not sure it’s working.
Broaden the Angle of View
Disability is a familiar topic to me but I believe my family and friends would be surprised to know that I claim that title. Or is it a category? Or is it a place in the political hierarchy – the imaginary one that contains all of the lists of all the types of oppression that we recognize in our desire to step up to edge of the panorama on offer and see a wide angle view of the social landscape?
I had a girlfriend once named Patty who used a wheelchair because she was paraplegic. I learned a lot from her before the relationship took a dive into her various illnesses, dragging mine with them. Well, not a pretty chain of events our breakup, but no matter. She told me that “AB’s” – her term for able-bodied people, with whom she’s had experienced many instances of micro-aggression performed against her and formed inside a cocoon of utter ignorance – AB’s would get their comeuppence in the end. Everyone, Patty said, is disabled. It’s just a matter of when their disability kicks in. So we all have a body and those bodies and the attendant minds are both resilient and fragile. Can be hurt. And when hurt, we tend to continue to plug away, dragging our sick and aching bodies through what’s left of our lives.
I wanted to write about disability – my own – so I could get some distance from it and see how it affects my behavior, my personality, my ability to be close to people and the stance – a fighter’s stance – that I take to face the day, the world, my life. Today, I feel a bit cynical.
Top image – waiting room at Bellevue Hospital, New York