Susan Hall writes about avoiding COVID-19 in an original essay for Newsweek.
In late September, for the first time since the pandemic started, a member of our three-person Michigan household—my husband Mike—tested positive for COVID-19.
All the dire warnings that came with my son's diagnosis—significant intellectual disability, mostly uncontrolled lifelong seizures—have come to pass, despite trips to prestigious medical centers, despite dozens of pharmaceutical interventions, despite trials of dietary therapies and of CBD, despite three brain surgeries.
We've been careful to acknowledge a line, though, between his disease–epilepsy caused by his IS–and his intellectual disability, which we've come to view as a part of who he is as a person, not as something to be cured.I have often thought of a line in a book where Susan Sontag cites 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer."Disease can be challenged by the will," Schopenhauer claimed then. It's an appealing idea, that illness can be outsmarted.
Susan Hall's son has epilepsy and learning difficulties as a result of infantile spasms he developed as a toddler.But to equate avoiding sickness with"correct" behavior is hurtful to persons who live with illness despite their best efforts. It further pushes an ableist narrative that falsely associates heath with choice, even moral choice.
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