Pick Your Poison … It May Save Your Life

So. As I was taking exception this week to Mel Y. Chen's supposition that our society seeks mainly to preserve the perfect white child living in our midst, this photo of a billboard showed up on the front  page of the Friday Modesto Bee. Mind you now, Livingston (where the billboard resides) is a small valley farming town; the census shows 76% of the residents to be hispanic. One would assume there is an equal percentage of Hispanic children in the town. Yet who gets top billing when a group gets a collective bee in its bonnet about toxins in the food supply? (Chen wins this round … )

Now for the rest of my post:

Mel Y. Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections” has kept me thinking all week. I struggle with her desire to push theory close to (for me) the absurd. Katherine has a nicer way of saying this: “Chen’s prose is dense, and several of her lines of argumentation push at the boundaries of what we expect to see in an article.” Chen has me whipping all over the place, trying to reconfigure images with which I am most acquainted with the new pictures she draws for her readers.

My last nursing position was with Stanislaus County Department of Public Health. I worked in the maternal-child health department and overheard many conversations re: exposure of patients to environmental agents. While the majority dealt with farm worker-parents exposure to pesticides (Modesto is a farming community,) there were more than enough conversations that revolved around our county’s children’s exposure to lead, either through disintegrating poisoned paint in their homes or from ingestion of candies brought in from Mexico and marketed in small ethnic grocery stores that our clients frequented. The outcome can be horribly devastating, is terribly sad, and is almost entirely preventable.

As a public health nurse, however, I never observed a white male child suggestively and longingly lick a toy train. Rather, I observed many children of all colors going about their day in an environment that (through no fault of their own) was silently hostile to them. Chen takes these children’s stories and weaves them with sexual overtones, links them with the American myth of Manifest Destiny, and then rides with them on the transcontinental railroad West until she arrives at her theory of U.S. capitalistic addictions that plunders other countries. Fuel for these addictions is extracted from poor workers who labor under toxic conditions to keep Americans happy with never-ending inexpensive products, until those same Americans turn on the workers when those products become environmentally unfriendly. Specifically we rejected China who sent us lead-laden Thomas the Trains; I remember too when we rejected Great Britain for sending mad-cow disease, Southeast Asia for distributing SARS virus to the world, and—as is the case now—West Africa for its export of Ebola.

Which brings me (finally, you say) to how I would incorporate this information into a discussion of Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Someday I would like to lecture in one of the many Health Science Humanities courses developing as I write this in professional schools across the globe. Chen gives me a unique opportunity to introduce students to humanities’ theory that can relate to their chosen profession; her work is perfect to stimulate conversation in the health science classroom. I would concentrate on sharing Chen’s personal description of trying to survive in a world in which her health was at the mercy of the next woman wearing perfume or man carrying cleaning rags who happened to cross her path. I would hang Chen’s story on whichever medical or nursing model the class utilized so that it would inform not only the students’ sensibilities and empathy, but also would lend itself to formulating diagnosis, planning, and interventions for care. Chen’s story is unique but sooner or later, we’ll all have a story to tell of how toxins affect our lives. Many of us will deliberately encounter those poisons when we try to save our lives.

Medicine is all about toxins in one form or another. The toxins are either killing us or curing us. Health Science professionals spend their days balancing the pros and cons of injecting the sick human body with poison agents that will make them well again. Virtually every treatment that will heal in small amounts will kill in large ones (liver-toxicity in Tylenol, anyone?) Chemotherapeutic agents are calibrated everyday and then administered to willing humans by nurses gowned, masked and double-gloved to protect them from the toxic substances. Radiation therapists implant radiation rods into willing patients to soothe solid tumors and buy time for patients who must refuse to longer cradle their children or pets because of the dangerous radiation being emitted from their body.

It would take but a few minutes for students to recall the therapies they’ve administered and their healthy fear in handling the poisons. They could then contemplate their patients’ responses to knowing a lethal substance that could potentially kill them was being utilized to stave off a disease that was likely to kill them sooner.  We’d spend some time discussing how people get to the point that they consider ‘poisoning’ their already poisoned bodies. How strong is the will to live? What pain will one tolerate to buy a few more weeks, months, or maybe even years? And, what if it’s not worth it in the end, what if the scarring from the toxic agents takes a toll greater than the initial disease?

There is a plethora of poetry written by survivors about the horrors and the healings of chemo and radiation therapies. There are also boatloads of books dealing with the same. Pale Horse, Pale Rider presents an interesting example of “toxic cures”: as I noted last week (and won’t bother you with again this week), the protagonist Miranda (and her real-life doppelganger, Katherine Anne Porter,) were both saved when they were probably minutes from death in the end stages of influenza with an experimental injection of strychnine. You might recall Miranda’s silent scream as the painful toxin raced throughout her body when the poison was administered. We move to the very limits in our attempt to cure the ill; we hope we don’t push too far and lose our patients. More than that, we hope that if our toxic concoctions save our patients’ bodies, they will still have their minds to take home with them.

I know I’ll continue to grapple with Chen’s work for a long time. It has been interesting to see how many of us have chosen to blog on this piece and from how many different angles we’ve tackled it. Such a multi-faceted article can only enrich our future discussions.