In this moving and personal blog post, Wendy Stainton-Rogers explores her experiences of the meaningful everyday practice of getting her ears pierced. Wendy connects this with her experience becoming, and remaining, the medical subject and object due to serious illness and disability.
Three weeks ago I went into a jeweller’s shop in a busy shopping mall and got my ears pierced. It was on my ‘day out’ to celebrate my 71st birthday. Possibly a bit of a weird thing to do at my age, but not that big a deal surely? Actually, for me it was a very big deal. It was the first time in years that I had got something done to my body for a frivolous reason rather than for a medical one.
In 2011 during a biopsy to see if I had cancer, my bowel was accidently punctured and, a day or so later, I felt dreadful and my temperature skyrocketed, the alarm was called and I needed to have many hours of emergency surgery to deal with the septicaemia that had ensued. From that point on my life changed dramatically and I became highly medicalised. Continue reading