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

146
situations together… erm… can share humour… there‟s certainly a lot of humour
that goes around cancer wards… (l.1:592ff.)
Jennie describes here the benefits of being able to share with people who have had similar
life experiences. Importantly, this involves a realism which breaks through the myth of
normality and the ideological position that health is the normal human condition (Frank,
1997).
Sarah talked about the importance in her life of having met and talked with Robert, a
disabled comedian who also has cerebral palsy, who she became friends with after seeing
him perform at the Edinburgh Fringe:
I hadn‟t met anyone, like, older than me who was… do you know… that confident
and that sure, and kind of… not looked after me, but said it‟s all right to feel that
way… and, I mean, I just felt that… I don‟t know if it was just, like… you know, I‟d
never really had in-depth conversations about disability or anything, but just
knowing that someone had gone through similar stuff… and was all right… and I
suppose, as well, like, it sounds silly, but being quite impressionable at the age I was
when I met him, he was married and had a kid and that was something I think I felt
wasn‟t… again going back to expectations… wasn‟t expected of me… and so
meeting someone who had that was kind of like… you can achieve that… and that‟s
what I‟d wanted my whole life… was someone to… to look up to… and sort of
think you could… aspire to that… for me that was really important… because…
well, because of the age I was at… being a teenager, and wanting to have a
relationship, and not… not being able to at that point… not feeling I knew anyone
well enough… and it was that… I suppose that‟s when I started to change… to think
that, you know, it‟s all right to kind of feel that way… (l.1:823ff.)
Sarah describes a situation in which, until she talked with Robert, she had been given few
indications that she might one day be able to enjoy sex, get married, have children, live an
ordinary life. Not only was this something she had felt „wasn‟t expected of me‟, it was
something she had felt unable to talk to anyone about. Meeting somebody older than her
who, in her eyes, had „made it‟ in these terms, was very important for Sarah. While Sarah
says that this is what she had wanted her whole life, „somebody to... look up to‟, this is about
more than saying that disabled young people need role models. Sarah‟s words are an