On Medical Trauma and Disability; Beautiful Malady by Ennis Rook Bashe
I’d seen the ARC for Beautiful Malady on NetGalley and didn’t think to request it for the longest time. When I got the email from the publisher ( Interstellar Flight Press), I asked for the book simply because I felt it wouldn’t be a long read.
It wasn’t.
I finished it in one sitting, and now I sit here giving it four stars and missing my grandmother.
When my grandmother had a heart attack (she’s fine now, thank you), she wasn’t at home with us in Pakistan. She was in Calgary with my uncle. She didn’t realize that a woman’s heart attack symptoms were very different from a man’s, so it took them 20 hours to take her to the hospital and find out what was happening to her. This excerpt from “i, magus” describes her fairly well, even at that hospital;
Enough years from now, most of you will be like my grandparents,
dragging yourselves up and down stairs because to admit needing a cane would be
weakness, horror, loss.
Insisting on doing things for yourself.
I can get my own groceries. I can still drive.
No matter the meaningless suffering.
No matter the hours it carves out of your day.
And while my uncle did his best to care for her, she was sometimes alone with the nurses, wherein the trouble lies. She can still remember how they handled her very vividly; for instance, when the nurse intentionally caused pain when a drip came out. Other medical mishaps took place, but this may not be the time and place for them.
And this is my grandmother, who has done her best every day to stay as healthy and independent as possible, who still doesn’t trust doctors around her and thinks it’s pointless to go. There was plenty that happened.
As Ennis mentions in the author’s note, medical trauma is real, and some bodies are treated differently. You are supposed to recover or die, to be an angel or a source of hope, possibly because regardkess those who treat us should honestly be locked up ( my mother calls me into the living room every time there’s a disabled performer on reality television)
If you’re on Twitter, you’ve seen all the posts from young men and women becoming doctors or doing house jobs, and sometimes the callousness astounds us. It makes you sit there and know that you should focus on your health because being at their mercy would be something else.
And when it comes to mental health, that’s its own unregulated ball game.
But what do you do when your illness or disability means that you’ll constantly be at the receiving end of the worst? That is what Ennis writes about in this book. But it’s also a conversation about the body and what you feel when it feels like when the thing we’re meant to exist in, doesn’t seem to want to exist for us. What sheer will can stand for and what love can and cannot make us feel.
If I can’t hold back agony, let me hold you.
she didn’t know that love could carve canyons in her.
that touch could stray outside for-your-own-good.
her heart monitor squealed tachycardic when they kissed
for the first time delighted: how easy it is to tug off a hospital gown, how much skin it shows.~ excerpt from rose ghost vii.
I’m not a good poetry reviewer, even though I read a lot of it; but Beautiful Malady is one of the best anthologies I’ve read this year and deserves to be checked out! You can tell that this is not the authors first rodeo; Ennis has published other works of fiction and poetry, and this reflects that experience. It’s a well put together collection that has a theme that it sticks to instead of being all over the place.
Originally published at http://thegirlwhoreadsdotcom.wordpress.com on July 3, 2023.
