“The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times,” the journalist Tom Scocca wrote in a recent article in New York magazine. Whoever has health one day can be deprived of it the next. Scocca was writing at the time about stunning changes to his own health. Sickness, even when easily or quickly healed, brings with it suffering or pain; prolonged illness stirs up uncertainty, loss, and grief. One can so easily cross from the realm of the healthy and able-bodied into that of the sick and impaired. And what goes on inside the body, despite modern imaging and lab tests, is inevitably shrouded and opaque, hidden under our skin and within our cells. Our bodies remind us that there is so much we do not know: what an ache or a tickle or a lump means, whether it is benign or dangerous, an inevitable change over the course of a long life or a menacing omen of something much worse.
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