On Writing

[maccaj]

A break, much needed, from the drudgery of moving and the seemingly endless nature of sorting a lifetime of things, trying to weigh that which no longer holds meaning against things which hold meaning only to us, and whether the latter are worth keeping any more than the former. I am Famine Irish stock, born of a mother whose own mother lived out

Comments

[nightengalesknd]

I haven't read the book, and I agree that the general caliber of disability fiction written by non-disabled people is. . . well, as you describe.

But I wonder if the author was alluding to patterning, this therapy tried in the 50s by these guys named Doman and Delacato, who at least claimed that crawling (whether or not the person in question could already walk) was a wonderful therapy for brain injury (including CP), intellectual disability, autism and LDs, just to name a few. They actually lay kids down and had 4 adults move their limbs through the crawling pattern, over and over. Because. . .somehow crawling, and other brain exercises were supposed to reset the brain into the proper pattern.

[maccaj]

I'm sure it was patterning - it's described pretty extensively in the book - but the first issue there is that Adah (the character with hemiplegia) encounters this therapy in med school in Atlanta in 1968... which is not late enough to be improbable, but it felt awfully borderline to me for a major teaching hospital

[maccaj]

From the book:

In medical school I have been befriended by an upstart neurologist, who believes I am acting out a great lifelong falsehood. Adah’s False Hood. In his opinion, an injury to the brain occurring is early as mine should have no lasting effects on physical mobility. He insists there should have been complete compensation in the undamaged part of my cerebral cortex, and that my dragging right side is merely holding on to a habit it learned in infancy. I scoffed at him, of course. I was unprepared to accept that my whole sense of Adah was founded on a misunderstanding between my body and my brain

[nightengalesknd]

Ah, so it's Magic Patterning, 20 years out of period. . .

You know, I actually read the Patterning guys' book a few years back? If you ignore the lack of evidence, it reads alarmingly plausibly. . .

[maccaj]

Indeed

[crash_puter]

wow... childish.