Diana

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“It’s always wide open for a child. A child cannot open or close the door of consent. The handle is simply not within reach.”
― Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger

“Medical students are taught to imagine a binary: doctor and patient, science and faith, objective truth and superstitious fallacy, us and them. Our morning rounds are an exercise in telling and retelling patients’ stories in a way that explains their illnesses, cloaked in the sense of objectivity offered by a white coat. But the stories told on these rounds are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives. On rounds, a woman’s pain might be recast as anxiety, for instance, while a vitamin deficiency born of alcohol use might be regarded as a deserved punishment.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

“whether I liked it or not, whether I chose to stifle it or shout it from the rooftops, I saw everything through the lens of rape. It’s still the case today: Even though now there are lulls when I can think about other things, even though it’s not always about that, often it still is. In that sense he won and there’s nothing I can do about it. Damaged for life.”
― Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger