One Quote + One Note + One Question January 19, 2024
One Quote
My students are wary of the tendency of more-experienced doctors to treat an illness rather than a person, a body rather than a mind — but they do not pretend there is an easy solution. There is a problem of subjectivity in medicine: no two people experience illness in the same way. Humanity muddies the water. The manifestation of a disease, the irregularity of symptoms, the way we each perceive pain, and how we express our suffering all introduce unreliability. Medicine is already inefficient, expensive, and time intensive. The desire to help as many people as possible chafes against the desire to offer unique and tender care to each person, and this is the terrible paradox my students find themselves in — caught between breadth and depth of care. Treating a single, predictable illness in an objective field is more practical than trying to treat a unique, irreducible, unpredictable person, which would demand tromping through the subjective swamp of their interior world. Better, then, to treat the disease itself, the body abstracted and reduced to a single dimension.
- Jonathan Gleason
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One Note
I have been in the hospital with my husband for three days. We will go home today. He should recover from his illness. I should recover from my exhaustion.
Hospital time is a strange sort of time. And illness time twists our hours and days into unfamiliar mazes with hidden exits.
I love the quote above about how we should be more concerned about treating humans instead of treating illnesses. But as I read it more closely and consider our recent experiences, I noticed the problem is more than a question of how to provide quality care to a whole person instead of an object with a list of symptoms. How we give or don't give care, how we receive or don't receive care, can also be time problems. So many time problems.
Until next time,
Charlotte
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One Question
How does illness change your sense of time?
Charlotte Donlon’s writing and work are always rooted in helping her readers, audience, and clients notice how art and other good things help them belong to themselves, others, the divine, and the world. Charlotte is the founder of Thoughtful Books Etc.™, One O’Clock Central, Spiritual Direction for Writers® , Spiritual Direction for Belonging™, and Parenting with Art™. Her first book is The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other. Her next book on Spiritual Direction for Writers will be published by Eerdmans in 2025. Charlotte’s essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Curator, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, The Millions, Mockingbird, and elsewhere. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and a certificate in spiritual direction from. To receive Charlotte’s latest updates, news, announcements, and all kinds of good things, subscribe to Thoughtful Readers Etc. + Five Good Things.