7:48pm November 26, 2013

“Later, I would learn that x-rays were of no use in examining connective tissue, and that this was what was shattered and severed throughout my body due to the rampant autoimmune disease and the aftermath of a crushing car accident. If my tendons and ligaments were on the outside of my body, shredded like rotting cotton thread, then perhaps my suffering would not be ascribed as imagined. But they are not visible.”

Meadow Jones, “The Able-ist Gaze: Imagining Malingering”

Earlier in her life, Meadow Jones saw a doctor for excruciating neck pain. After a normal x-ray, knowing she couldn’t afford an MRI, he dismissed her pain and assumed it had no physical cause. A decade later, she was able to afford an MRI. As she explains,

During the junior year of my undergraduate term, when I was already in my mid 30s, it became apparent from the MRI I finally received that I was being paralyzed by the crushed vertebrae from my car accident, and that lupus (also suffered by my father) and fibromyalgia (ditto, my mother) had advanced these injuries to the point of emergency. I remember that the doctor who finally read my MRI scans cried — she excused herself to the other room, and I watched her eyes tear as she left. 

(via aragingquiet)

But, there’s nothing important in there besides bones, amirite? (Except when they’re actually messed up—so then you obviously don’t even need x-rays, because muscle spasms obviously caused by stress. Or some such garbage.)

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