I am sick and a woman. I write my own name. I am handed at each appointment a printout from the general database that I am told to amend or approve. The databases would be empty without us.
Receptionists distribute forms, print the bracelets to be read later by scanners held in the hands of other women. The nursing assistants stand in a doorway from which they never quite emerge. They hold these doors open with their bodies and call out patients’ names. These women are the paraprofessionals in the thresholds, weighing the bodies of patients on digital scales, taking measurements of vital signs in the staging area of a clinic’s open crannies. Then they lead the patient (me) to an examining room and log into the system. They enter the numbers my body generates when offered to machines : how hot or cold I am, the rate at which my heart is beating. Then they ask the question : Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten ? I try to answer, but the correct answer is always anumerical. Sensation is the enemy of quantification. There is no machine, yet, to which a nervous system can submit sensation to be transformed into a sufficiently descriptive measurement.
Contemporary medicine hyper-responds to the body’s unruly event of illness by transmuting it into data. Patients become information not merely via the quantities of whatever emerges from or passes through their discrete bodies, the bodies and sensations of entire populations become the math of likelihood (of falling ill or staying well, of living or dying, of healing or suffering) upon which treatment is based. The bodies of all people are subject to these calculations, but it is women, most often, who do the preliminary work of relocating the nebulousness and uncountablity of illness into medicine’s technologized math.