Recovering from surgery recently, I came home with a catheter. Before this, I might have said I had “no idea” what that experience was like. But that phrasing is misleading. I had plenty of ideas about it — abstract notions, mental pictures, secondhand descriptions. But I lacked a sense of it: the physical reality, discomfort, and vulnerability, the way the body responds when something foreign is introduced to it. Ideas… Read More »

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