I was impressed by Boyer’s ability to write in a way that is so deeply personal and reflective, and yet also technical and didactic. This is a difficult combination because these types of writings usually take the form of different genres. The Undying, which is a memoir/novel, at points reads like poetry and at other moments like more of a historical account. In the beginning in particular, I was reminded of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas because of Boyer’s repetition of phrases and her intentional placing of words on the page.

The story Boyer is sharing with her readers is especially impactful because she takes the readers through her medical and emotional journey. The readers learn information at the same time the narrator does, however, the readers benefit from years of the author’s reflection. Even though the debilitating effects of breast cancer are discussed at length, Boyer still manages to be empowering and thoughtful in contextualizing her story in a larger story of breast cancer as a global phenomenon. I am wondering how she balanced recounting her in the moment feelings with hindsight reflection, and what this balance meant for the readers’ experience.

Throughout The Undying, Anne Boyer focuses in great detail on the idea of “appearance.” This is only logical, due to the traditional image of “breast cancer” we have in our minds. When my mom’s best friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, my mind immediately constructed a picture of her without hair and at what would have been an unhealthy weight. She never actually lost her hair, but the image I simply created persists in my mind to this day. 

Writing on page 112, after she undergoes surgery, Boyer writes, “We looked at what we could see, one of us in horror, me in harsh, curious insistence.” Her friend’s reaction to the image of Boyer’s operated-upon body is one of horror mixed with sympathy, a common reaction to visible symptoms of serious diseases, but hers is one of curiosity – to her, it is her body, not ugly or beautiful, just hers.

When she writes about the exhaustion incurred by her disease on pages 250-251, she discusses this phenomenon from a slightly different angle. By getting out of bed, getting dressed, and going about their daily business every day, a sick person, to a certain extent, presents an air of normal appearances, but are sick on the inside. While this is nearly the inverse of the example above, it is yet another way that appearances subvert the reality of illness.

This discussion of appearances is crucial in striving to make a better world. We live in a world where most will eagerly give up their seat on the train for someone who is visibly pregnant or ailing, but might not for someone who puts on the appearance of normalcy, even if they are suffering behind that mask. Inversely,  it’s just as possible for a person who is not suffering but for whatever reason has the appearance of a suffering person, and to be treated with deference they don’t need (which can be hurtful). 

We base so much of the actions we take throughout the day, and when it comes to illness and disability, this can be seriously harmful and impactful. This, among many, many other reasons, is why this memoir is so powerful and important.

A striking phenomenon that Anne Boyer points out in her book The Undying is the representation of the cancer, specifically breast cancer, patient in literature, film, and other forms of media. She describes that this account of the cancer patient does not come from the patient themself, but from a family member, spouse, or close friend of them. She describes, “In literature, one person’s cancer seems to exist as an instrument of another person’s epiphanies, and sickness takes the form of how a sick person looks” (Boyer, 111). The experience of the sick person is often told through their loved one’s hardship or grief, instead of relying on the firsthand account of the sick person themselves. This made me ask myself: Does the loved one’s experience with the sickness override that of the sick? The obvious answer it may seem is no, of course not, the sick person experiences tremendous amounts of pain while always carrying around the emotional weight of their diagnosis and the question if they will even survive. 

Anne Boyer’s text illustrates the experience of being a breast cancer patient in modern times from her own experience but also harping upon the shared experience of many patients as they deal with the healthcare system. Boyer structured her text by devoting the first half of it to her diagnosis, treatment, and her relationship to her illness, while in the second half, explaining the frustrations she experienced while dealing with the modern health care system. In structuring the text this way, she sets up a call to action (an inherent example of writing and social change) to restructure the way the world thinks of sick people and to save their lives.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory?

Seven.

And on a scale from 1 to 7, how much do you believe that there’s something wrong with you?

Five.

The point of EMDR is to close your eyes and see where your thoughts carry you, where one picture in your mind means a million different things and a million different pathways to doors you forgot you had left behind and suddenly they are all blown open with the wind generated by let’s see what you notice from there where you feel your heartbeat in your right ankle and the blood rushing in your left arm and somehow the words keep coming and coming and  

But like, hear me out: could all of my memories be like twos? Or threes? Is that a good baseline?

How do you quantify that? It wasn’t like I hadn’t dealt with trauma– fuck, the last two times I was here I had no idea just how much I had repressed that shit– but it also wasn’t like my life was perfect otherwise. 

When I was walking home at 2 am in the quad I suddenly thought that everything could end if the wrong person saw a strange brown man holding something other than gummy worms in his pocket. 

That didn’t traumatize me. 

No single thing had shocked me into that basic fact. It was just a fact that I had come to realize. 

I don’t do well with others and I know that’s my anxiety talking but I never did understand why I felt weird bringing people back home. I’m sure Mom would gladly set out food for any one of my friends who I wanted to hang out with. They didn’t know my friends existed; they were just names that I would come up with at the top of my head if they pressed.

Why did I always go to their apartments?

I’ve always been afraid of asking for my own space because I felt bad when I considered telling people I didn’t fall into the boxes that they had cut out for me. If the only thing that mattered was how people saw me, why did my perception and theirs fail to align? 

I can only control myself to change.

It felt like I’d never get here. The whole point of everything I did was to get here. And it would have been by my hand.

Or by his. I wasn’t okay with that loss of control, but I knew what it felt like. And by definition, I couldn’t do anything about it. 

The beads that dug into my right palm twirled, stretched, tangled, looped, untangled, and twisted in my grasp. It was better than my fingernails biting into my own skin. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory now?

Eight. 

Process Notes:

This was a particularly hard writing assignment to do, because I wasn’t sure what I could connect my topic to that had a STEM focus; I ended up choosing my therapy session, which I saw Sofia also did. I like what I did with incorporating things said in session next to what hasn’t been said (which is a weird concept to begin with, because the idea of therapy is that there shouldn’t be a lot unsaid), but I don’t know if I connect the thoughts together well enough. I’m also on the fence about if I should have tried to take a more objective line of speaking; I like how it sounds though. It sounds like me. 

Alfred Stieglitz said that “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” Perhaps fittingly, the Wikipedia blurb that appears with a Google search of his name credits to him the status of “photography (as) an accepted art form.” To put it another photographs capture an image of the moment, but do not capture the image of the moment; the subtle reality captured by the photographer may be the reality they experience, but it is not reality. 

Pete Souza, the chief White House photographer under Barack Obama, gave us an insight into this phenomenon, publishing photo after photo on Instagram, Flickr, and now in print in multiple books. Shealah Craighead, the Trump administration’s chief photographer, however, has posted very few of her photos, the majority of which are published in a single 50-photo “First Fifty Days” album on the President’s Facebook.

My eyes are immediately drawn to two pictures on Souza’s Instagram page and two pictures on Trump’s Facebook. Peculiarly, all four are photos of hands.

The hands, arms, and torsos of President Obama and Representative John Lewis form an M of skin, gray, and pinstriped navy, the elder hand grasped by the younger. There are several stories told here, with all of them simultaneously true. The owner of the older hand seems to lean on the younger as he marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, following the steps he took five decades ago. At the same instant, in the same photo, however, the younger hand meaningfully grasps the elder. Physically holding onto courage, onto good trouble, onto the aging emblem of Civil Rights.

Two hands reach for Clark Reynolds, both just barely in contact with his child-size necktie at the moment the photographer’s mirror flipped up to expose the sensor of his camera for mere milliseconds. The longer you look, the more details you notice. Clark’s dress shirt, despite his rather sharp outfit (for a toddler), hangs low out the bottom of his suit jacket, suggesting that he’s been standing and fidgeting behind the rope line for quite some time. The president’s head, smiling and out of focus, takes up the majority of the top of the frame as he leans over to adjust the young man’s tie. A smiling moment amidst the world’s most stressful job, brought about by an unsmiling child standing before him, seemingly unaware of just how cool this is. Only another picture in this post shows the wonder he felt, perhaps one of the most famous pictures of the eight years Obama served. A woman’s hand stretches from behind the president to assist him in his task, only revealed by the caption as belonging to first lady Michelle Obama. Finally, your eyes follow the tie down from the First Lady’s hand to the President’s. You notice the final touch, that Clark’s tie, tucked into his suit jacket, wraps around the rope line in front of him, a comedic touch that only a caring parent would think to add.

Representative Greg Walden’s hands sit atop a piece of paper, one holding a pen, one holding down the page as if it could blow away. In front of him sits a placard with his name and title on it. That is all. No nuance, no story.

The second picture, to be blunt, is a bad picture. The president’s frame fills the leftmost two thirds of the frame, and his hand signs a massive scrawled signature on a campaign hat. That is all. No nuance, no story.

This piece of writing may seem like a review of photography, but it is not. It is a critique of the way this White House operates. Rather than the approach that Pete Souza took, of capturing complicated, nuanced, images, including moments of disagreement and weakness, there is an utter lack of that in any feed associated with the current president. His feed today features mostly signs that read his own name and staged pictures of himself and his family. The nuances of the White House documentary photography of yesteryear appears to have faded away. Here’s hoping that’s temporary.

Process notes

It was pretty difficult to decide what to write about, as my subject is not one that is routinely documented in the sciences, other than how much certain claims about topics like global warming or the efficacy of vaccinations can be. Instead, I decided to talk about something adjacent – we often consider things like photography and videography to be objective, and at times photographers and videographers strive to be exactly that. However, inherent in any photo or video is both a story (what was going on) and an intention (what the photographer or videographer intended to convey). One thing I think we can all agree on is the general lack of nuance coming from the Trump administration, and I think this is a good way of examining it. All the photos published have a purpose, the vast majority of which have the purpose of making President Trump look presidential, a complex word I talked about early in the quarter as it related to exactitude. The pictures of President Obama, on the other hand, are highly nuanced and complex, showing courage, emotion, and weakness through their composition.

In order to show this, I focused on four pictures where at least a significant portion of the picture is someone’s hand or hands, and went from there. As much as possible I tried to avoid making this an art review, and talk about how I personally experienced the photos, but I feel like I slipped too much into art critique. When I revise this for my portfolio, I’ll be sure to address that.

I close my eyes as I sit on the edge of my bed, my chest rising up and down quickly as I struggle to breathe. To go to the hospital or not? It’s a Friday night and for most people, the answer would be common sense. I’m having trouble breathing and I won’t be able to see my primary doctor until Monday so what’s there to consider?

I open my eyes and look down at the blue inhaler that’s been my companion for the last few days. Unfortunately, it hasn’t helped much, which worries me. Rarely, does my asthma bother me and when it does, it’s usually solved by a few puffs. After all, I’d only had one asthma attack in my life.

Something else is wrong. I know it.

So why am I hesitating to get off the bed, walk into my mother’s room, and ask her to drive me to the ER?

I think of all of the past visits for various reasons…all ending similarly: a regret of going. But I am scared. And I don’t want to spend another night coughing so much that I wake up gasping for breath, too scared that if I shut my eyes, they will be shut forever. So, deciding to trust myself, to trust my body, I walk into my room and make the request of my mother. She gives me the concerned look that she always does when I’m sick. I’ve been trying to ease her mind for the last few days by saying that I’m fine, but I know that she knows that I’m not. Mothers always know.

I put on clothes and head to the car. Don’t mention your asthma. Don’t mention your asthma. Don’t mention…

It’s a quiet, but short drive. I walk in and feel out the chart and soon, I am quickly called to the front to get triaged. My heart is pounding. Here is the first test.

“Hi, sweetie, what are you in for today?” the young nurse asks taking my temperature and blood pressure.

Sweetie. Annoyance creeps in. Yes, I am short, very short and could easily pass for 15, even though I am 20. But, already, I feel belittled, and I know what I am about to say will be disregarded, as it usually is with “children.”

“I’m having trouble breathing,” I say, a bit of wheezing apparent as I do so.

She nods as she enters then in and asks for my other symptoms. But then we get to the past patient history portion. I can see her expression change to one of slight irritation.

“Any other medical conditions besides asthma?”

She glances out at the waiting room that is overflowing with sick people waiting to be seen. I knew from past experience that clearly I was expected to save this for a trip to my normal doctor.

I instantly regret coming.

I am sent back to wait in the waiting room with my mother and all of the other sick people.

I am called to the back. I sit on the white bed, listening to the beeping of the heart monitors, a sound that I hear more than I want.

A doctor walks in, looking down at his chart.

I brace myself for the confrontation.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Jacoby,” he says. “I understand you’ve been having trouble breathing? When did you start having trouble?”

I launch into my recounting. The recounting I’d practiced in my head the whole drive over and while waiting in the waiting room. “It started a few days ago. I had a really bad cold: runny nose, coughing, fatigue…but then I couldn’t breathe at night and my coughing is so bad that I can’t sleep at night.” I avoid the mention of my asthma. I know it will eventually come up, but I’m curious to see what he will suggest otherwise.

“Let me take a listen.” He listens. “I can hear wheezing.” He looks at the chart. “It could be your asthma.”

I try my hardest not to roll my eyes. “Yes, I’ve tried my inhaler, but it hasn’t helped.”

“Have you tried a breathing treatment?”

I lock eyes with him. Oh, it would be so easy to send me home with one of those.

“I don’t think it’s my asthma…or just my asthma…this feels different…like something else.” I try my best to explain, but I am overwhelmed.

I can see the tiredness in his face. It’s a late summer night. I know he thinks it’s my asthma, but he knows by the determined look on my face that he has to do something else. “I’ll order a few tests.”

I am relieved and soon I am escorted to get a chest X-Ray.

When the results are back, I sit in the room, patiently. The doctor reenters.

“So your X-rays don’t show anything abnormal. Your cold most likely triggered your asthma to start acting up. It’s pretty common. We’ll give you a breathing treatment. That should make you feel better.”

It is not what I expected, and it is not what I wanted to hear, but I don’t know what else to say. Was there another test that I should suggest? Unsure, I just shake my head “okay.”

I am given the breathing treatment. As I sit there with the mask over my face, breathing in the treatment, I know that it is not working. Once I take it off, I still feel the same.

A nurse enters. “Feel any better?”

“Just a little.”

She turns and smiles at my mother. “Asthma is tricky. For some people, it affects them mostly as children and rarely as adults. But for others, it can remain a life-long issue.”

Why is she talking to my mother?

“My asthma rarely bothers me. Even as a child,” I say in an attempt to steer the conversation back in my direction.

She continues to talk to my mother. “It’s normal for the breathing treatments not to eliminate all of the symptoms right away. But it should start to open up her airways and over the next day or so, she should feel better. You can follow up with your primary doctor if the symptoms persist. We’ll give her another one before she leaves.” She walks out of the room.

I am livid. This was a waste of time again!

But what can I do?

She returns and once again, I have to sit through another ineffective breathing treatment. I’m ready to leave, so when she asks me again if I feel better, this time, I nod. “Yes, a lot better.”

On the ride home, I pray that whatever is the matter gets better over the next few days. And to my relief, it does.

But a few months later, in the absence of a cold, when I again feel the tightness of my chest, and it becomes hard to breathe, I don’t go to the hospital.

Writer’s Notes

My topic connects directly to doctor’s visits, so I wanted to reflect on my own doctor’s visits, but more specifically, on times when I didn’t feel heard. For me, personally, this usually happens during visits to the emergency room. I didn’t want to focus directly on race, even though that is a factor, but also on age and just being dismissed based on past diagnoses. For me, it’s always easy to relate upper respiratory issues to my asthma, which has been very frustrating. I wanted to explore how this can affect how patients thinks, how they explain their symptoms, their attempts to stand up for themselves, and feeling defeated. I struggled with trying to add a bit of humility for the doctors. I don’t want it to feel very one-sided. I tried to include that the doctors could be tired and to mention the room full of people waiting to be seen. I also wanted to include that the chest X-Ray didn’t show anything abnormal, so it would be reasonable to sum it up to asthma. So I would like suggestions on how I could better do that?

I wasn’t sure whether or not to take the free masks.

A black and white sign asks anyone who has a fever or cold symptoms to put one on. I am here for an STI checkup.

But a tanned white woman tucked away in the far corner, next to the magazine was staring. Her pouting lips are ready to devour. And a Chinese-looking guy just sneezed ferociously on the left row of seats and he sat slouching like a blob. But there’s another masked east Asian girl with puffy, tired eyes.

Too many variables! I scream internally. Precautions and over protection. Political representation. Fear, of not just the virus but also being exposed as naïve, wrong, to have felt safe. What my mom said the doctor said when she went to the hospital for her back pain, at the onset of SARS: “Are you an idiot?”

As in all other situations requiring stressful decisions, I stopped thinking about it. I focused on staring at the culprit. They have a customized stand for dispensing masks! Capitalism works wonders. Why are these masks yellow? They’re usually blue. Aren’t they usually blue? Does this mean they ran out of blue ones already? Are they actually hiding something?

There’s an unopened box laying casually on a side table. It’s sold out everywhere, even at Target.

Finally, it’s my turn to check-in. She asked if I have fevers or have coughed recently, I said no. Then she had to repeat Wuhan twice before I caught what she was saying. No, I have not been at all, I answered.

Wuhan is a very masculine name; she softened its edges with slurpy American sounds—I thought as I waited again, anxiously monitoring my fellow patients. Every string of cough detonated like a round of grenades in my heart. But as a proud commander, I put up nonchalant faces and continuously convince myself of safety by scrolling through Facebook. See! They’re making memes about this.

A nurse came, casually called out a Chinese name that wasn’t mine. And then another.

There are moments you realize something extraordinary you’ve thought about and drilled for is actually happening, like that time when our apartment caught on fire from a cabbage. It feels like the beginning of a snowstorm. You detect little things of white falling down, but as you put a finger on it, it dissolves into nothing: you can never quite tell if this is reality flooding in, or another practice of imagining. Only when your limbs are frozen and it’s too late to run, can you know for sure.

I told myself it was just the flu, but bemasked myself either way. A while later someone called me. I followed her past a plastic construct protruding from the wall, some pipes circulating the air. This must be the quarantine space. Next to it on a chair sits a girl dozed off, a thin mask covering half of a slightly reddened face, draped over with sleek black hair. She woke up, lazily shook her shoulders with knotted brows. She coughed, ah, like drums beating on my fragile aorta.

Survival in the time of authoritarian rule sometimes means tweeting Epstein was murdered, and hoping horoscopes possess subversive powers. But always it means weighing one’s own eyes above lips fat from conceit. I know there were many more dead because I have seen the dead uncounted. But how do you know if this is one of the ghosts?

Surely not in America, I kept saying—there can be no shadows in the land shinning from coast to coast—but surely that’s what America would like you to think. Have I become an advertisement-infused buffalo, or do I stink of “third-world” superstition?

Two tubes of blood and half a bottle of pee later, I quickened my steps and fled from this narrow corridor of questions—with a box of masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer in my bag, just in case.

Note: I’m not sure how much of this writing contrasts the scientific and the humanistic perspective, or relates to my quarter-long endeavor. I had difficulty recalling a specific scientific diagnosis, or otherwise lacked solid memory that I dared to write about the diagnosis. But I particularly wanted to write about this because, first of all, the experience still worries me; it is slightly funny in a somewhat sad way; and it reveals the vulnerability in of my (our) belief in science when it is entwined with politics and our own life and death.

Memoir

Scars are a natural part of the healing process. They form when the dermis, a deep layer in the skin, has been penetrated. The body collects new collagen fibers to mend the damage.

Every Friday at 2 in the afternoon I go to therapy. I talk about my chronic depression and general anxiety disorder. I talk about my relationships, my friendships, not being able to wake up in the morning, not feeling motivated to do my class work, tensions with my family.

We don’t talk about my mixedness.

Therapy for that exists in solidarity.

When I was born, my mother wanted to name me Kelly. She thought I would be born white. As soon as she saw my skin and hair, she decided to name me Sofia. It was a better fit.

When I was five, my brother told all his friends I was adopted. They took one look at me and laughed, assuming of course. There’s no way someone as pale as him could have a sister as brown as me.

When I was nine, my parents friends debated over which of them I looked most like. Everyone assumed I was the spitting image of my dad. “If you look past her color, she has her moms face,” someone said.

When I was twelve, I was condemned for not being a Real Dominican. He looked me in the eyes, “you don’t speak spanish, and your mom is white. You’re not Dominican.” He was a Real Dominican, so he knew.

When I was fifteen, my mom called me a Black Irish. “Those exist,” she said, “we call them black Irish.” She wasn’t referring to Black people. She was referring to white people with black hair.

When I was seventeen, I sat in a circle at my high school during lunch with tears down my face. “I don’t know who I am. People keep telling me ‘oh, you’re this, oh you’re that’ but I don’t fucking know. Why can’t I be both? Why can’t one exist with the other? Why can’t I just be mixed?” My cheeks burned red as I rubbed the tears from my face. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to over share. It’s just overwhelming.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m mixed, too,” someone said.

Trauma lives in the body. For me, it lives in my face. These scars do not exist as raised discolored lumps of flesh that you can touch and feel. They exist in the brownish tone of my skin, in the shape of my eyes, in the texture of my hair, in the redness in my cheeks. They exist when you ask me, and I tell you the stories of how people see me and question me, from birth. When they question me, I question myself. Who am I when no one else can tell?

Process notes:

I really was unsure how to connect this memoir to STEM, so I decided to focus on a physical representation of pain. Therapy is a form of a doctor’s appointment, psychology is a science, and scarring is very representative. And yet, we don’t often consider the impact of emotional scars. The dermis in this case is my identity. These words have penetrated my identity through my face, because of how I look and how that doesn’t match people’s expectations of me. Maybe I should talk about my mixedness in therapy, but I find the most comforting aspect of it is relating to the shared traumas of people who have also experienced this scarring. A common theme of being mixed is an identity crisis, not know who you are or where you belong. The most soothing remedy for that is being in a space where you are not judged or questioned for your appearance because everyone around you understands the erasure of identity that occurs in that judgement.

To preserve formatting, I’ve attached my writing assignment and process notes below.

Content Warning: eating disorder

week 8

My writing assignment & process notes are in this PDF (some of my formatting didn’t translate into a direct post):

Week 8 Writing Assignment – Chloe Madigan PDF