Healthcare is Hell:
The unique horrors of having a body in America that led me to write my chapbook Blood Bath
by Christine Kanownik
“...the grotesque body is somehow always in opposition to the power of the state.”
⸺Sophia Siddique & Raphael Raphael, Transnational Horror Cinema
The American healthcare system operates in a state that is beyond the limit of human comprehension. These clinical intricacies have created such a Byzantine pattern that no single person could really hope to understand it all.
That is why we must have specialists; otherwise, no one could hold so many conflicting pieces of information. It would be like reading the thoughts of everyone on earth for a year.
The complexity of our system is partially a result of the complexities inherent in all our systems. We are fantastically complicated beings in a labyrinthian ecosystem of other such knotty beings and creatures.
However, our healthcare is also complex by design. It is a smokescreen behind which to hide corruption and exploitation. And hide and corrupt and exploit they do.
American healthcare’s addled system of filings, claims, bids, and certifications keep us all in a tenuous state of loss. We are all strung out, taut, at our breaking point, but all mostly okay for right now. We suffer it since it is the suffering we have always known.
It is only the sick, the old, and the poor who have to worry about it more than a couple times a year. And we do not like to think of them. Hopefully we will never need to be them, we think.
A sitting president wanted to lower the cost of medication for retirees on a fixed income and did so. But, as an expert sadly explains on a National Public Radio broadcast the next day, because of the way the American healthcare system works, it will actually end up making the drugs more expensive.
But that president’s moral and political failings (and there are so, so many) mean he will be replaced by a foaming-at-the-mouth reality TV star who is throwing a conspiracy theorist into American medicine's highest office of oversight.
+++++
It is in this landscape that my chapbook, Blood Bath, lives and breathes.
It opens with a creation story. In it, the world emerges from an unseeing eyeball, which, much like the Eye of Ra,¹ is both part of the body and its own discrete deity.
But the eye of my poem, while very likely feeling all sorts of emotions, stares down at her creation without concern. Every poem in the chapbook touches on the spectrum of care that extends from apathy to fanaticism.
Every day, we are overloaded to the point of building walls against really feeling anything. And I think that is the problem.
This will be especially true in the coming years, but it has always been the case that humans could not reliably depend on the people in power to provide them the care they needed. Very often, our caretakers do not take the necessary care. Our politicians, parents, bosses, and medical professionals can and will fail us. But that should not make us hard to the ones that do not.
The most important thing I can hope to communicate to anyone is: protect what you love and reject what cares not for you or what wishes to exploit you. Hold art and chosen community close against the horrors.
¹According to her Wikipedia page, “The disastrous fury and rampages of the eye goddess and the efforts of the gods to appease her are a prominent motif in Egyptian mythology.” #same
Christine Kanownik is a writer living in Michigan. She has two books of poetry. HEAD (Trembling Pillow Press, 2018) explores the art and literature of decapitation, and King of Pain (Monk Books, 2016) is a lyric meditation on love and trauma. Her work can be found in such places as FENCE, jubilat, and the Huffington Post.
She is the author of the chapbook Blood Bath, now available from Cul-de-sac of Blood.