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Guardians

His inability to tell me when he’s sick, the most baseline, possibly the easiest thing to express, means he isn’t expressing a million other needs that are harder to pin down: If his shoes are too tight. If his ear hurts. Once, my son was walking funny. When I looked at his foot, he had a bee stinger sticking out from his toe. Being a parent of a disabled child means I can’t assume anything. I am taking care of his needs, and if I miss a need he can’t express, I’m failing him. I’m always failing him.

Home Sick

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Speak, Memory

Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

Chair/Body/Home

What would it take for me to no longer want to leave my body? What would it take for me to see my body as my home? I don’t know, really, except perhaps more exposure to different ideas about disability, different ideas about beauty and worth.

Field Guide to Falling Ill

I can’t say what it’s like to suffer from a severe, chronic illness, the kind that knocks your life into a new orbit. But I can tell you what it’s like to be in the postscript of illness, its undead state, where the crisis has passed but recovery isn’t certain. It’s a dull, heavy place.

Invasion Of Privacy

Khiara M. Bridges On Poverty And Reproductive Justice

Three of the nine justices have publicly articulated their position that the Constitution does not contain a right to privacy — at least, when it comes to matters involving contraception. . . . And that’s just the three we know about.

Teeth

Losing them, fixing them, forgetting to put them in