A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

It could be argued that such a role has little relevance for many disabled people who will:
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accept some level of illness as the permanent background and intermittent
foreground of their lives (Frank, 1997:82).
This is to say nothing of people with long-term impairments which do not constitute sickness
and who live healthy lives on a day-to-day basis. However, I would suggest that this role
impacts on the lives of disabled people by marking impairment as a condition to be dealt
with cheerfully and privately. Many disabled people find themselves placed permanently in
the sick role even when they are not sick. Hence the disapproval Jennie experiences from
people who consider she is not playing the part.
Simultaneously, other people with impairments are reluctant to acknowledge these for fear of
being placed in the sick role. The association of disability with unwanted social status serves
to ensure that people do their best to keep impairment hidden or to minimise its significance
in terms of their everyday lives. Hazel describes the period leading towards the diagnosis of
her condition:
I had, I suppose, reoccurring health problems for about two years… er,
a few years ago… and one of the symptoms of that was just extreme tiredness… just
no energy at all… and the doctor just thought it was my age… at the time I was in my
mid to late thirties… and didn‟t really offer anything for me, and then I went home and
thought it‟s in my head… I must be imagining the way I‟m feeling… I used to go to
bed at night and… I thought that I was having to remind myself to breathe… and then
I really thought I‟d lost the plot… because I thought how can you be lying in bed and
feeling that you‟ve got to remind yourself to breathe… and so I was convinced that I
was just going round the hat rack, to be honest…and then left it another eighteen
months of feeling absolutely exhausted, tired, no energy at all… I‟d get in from work
and think oh, I need to do the dinner, or I need to put the iron on to do some ironing,
and then just lie on the settee… so for me, when I eventually got a diagnosis, it was a
huge relief… because I knew I wasn‟t mad… (l.1:156ff.)
Faced with an initial diagnosis of health, Hazel felt unable to draw attention to her symptoms
but rather experienced these as something to be dealt with privately. Fulfilling her expected
personal roles involved getting on with life, going to work and doing the housework,
continuing to carry out tasks she found increasingly exhausting. Insofar as she considered her
experience might be one of disability, this was only in terms of imagining herself „going