I wrote this poem back in January, which feels like a thousand years ago now. I held off posting it because I know how hard a year it’s been for doctors and how many of them have also succumb to an illness not yet understood, abandoned and devalued like so many of us chronically ill folks were long before Covid-19. But, given the attitudes towards disabled and chronically ill people in the US and the UK especially (“Just stay home!” or “Hurry up and die and decrease the surplus population!”), the people in retirement homes and other institutions left to die, the all too familiar plight of those with “Long Haul Covid”, and the continual dismissal of disabled and chronically ill voices in a time when we have real wisdom to offer–be it about finding yourself to still be ill when doctors can’t explain it or won’t believe it, coping with a reality that isn’t any less real just because we don’t want it to be or find it too hard to bear, or making due in isolation without adequate support systems–make this poem’s message all the more necessary. It’s my story and millions of others’; now, last year, and a thousand years before me. But I sincerely hope not a thousand years hence.
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Salt & Iron 