IHS2215 Figures of Speech Are Critical in Describing an Illness Essay 6 Take a stand on the claim below and make an argument for or against. Please be sure

IHS2215 Figures of Speech Are Critical in Describing an Illness Essay 6 Take a stand on the claim below and make an argument for or against. Please be sure to support your argument with examples from the readings provided and the main novel “Cutting for Stone”.

CLAIM: Metaphors and other figures of speech are critical and important in explaining or describing an illness or disease.

Use two (2) metaphors from the book “Cutting for Stone” and two (2) metaphors from the book “AIDS as its metaphors and Illness as a metaphor” (pages provided in the content list for week 6) to support your argument on the metaphors. additional references from other sources are welcome.
The minimum number of words for this assignment is 500.
Cite all information that is not your own in APA style. You can find more information on citation here: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01…
Include references at the end of the discussion in APA style
Here is rubric used to grade this section. see attached And because I love this life
I know I shall love death as well.
The child cries out when
From the right breast the mother
Takes it away, in the very next moment
To find in the left one
Its consolation.–Rabindranath Tagore, from Gitanjali
PROLOGUE
The Coming
AFTER EIGHT MONTHS spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my brother,
Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in
the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet
in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.The miracle of our birth took place
in Missing Hospital’s Operating Theater 3, the very room where our mother, Sister Mary
Joseph Praise, spent most of her working hours, and in which she had been most
fulfilled.When our mother, a nun of the Diocesan Carmelite Order of Madras,
unexpectedly went into labor that September morning, the big rain in Ethiopia had
ended, its rattle on the corrugated tin roofs of Missing ceasing abruptly like a
chatterbox cut off in midsentence. Over night, in that hushed silence, the meskel
flowers bloomed, turning the hillsides of Addis Ababa into gold. In the meadows around
Missing the sedge won its battle over mud, and a brilliant carpet now swept right up to
the paved threshold of the hospital, holding forth the promise of something more
substantial than cricket, croquet, or shuttlecock.Missing sat on a verdant rise, the
irregular cluster of whitewashed one- and two-story buildings looking as if they were
pushed up from the ground in the same geologic rumble that created the Entoto
Mountains. Troughlike flower beds, fed by the runoff from the roof gutters, surrounded
the squat buildings like a moat. Matron Hirst’s roses overtook the walls, the crimson
blooms framing every window and reaching to the roof. So fertile was that loamy soil
that Matron–Missing Hospital’s wise and sensible leader–cautioned us against stepping
into it barefoot lest we sprout new toes.Five trails flanked by shoulder-high bushes ran
away from the main hospital buildings like spokes of a wheel, leading to five
thatched-roof bungalows that were all but hidden by copse, by hedgerows, by wild
eucalyptus and pine. It was Matron’s intent that Missing resemble an arboretum, or a
corner of Kensington Gardens (where, before she came to Africa, she used to walk as a
young nun), or Eden before the Fall.Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on
the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like “Missing.” A clerk in the
Ministry of Health who was a fresh high-school graduate had typed out THE MISSING
HOSPITAL on the license, a phonetically correct spelling as far as he was concerned. A
reporter for the Ethiopian Herald perpetuated this misspelling. When Matron Hirst had
approached the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript.
“See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing,” he said, as if hed
proved Pythagoras s theorem, the sun’s central position in the solar system, the
roundness of the earth, and Missing’s precise location at its imagined corner. And so
Missing it was.NOT A CRY or a groan escaped from Sister Mary Joseph Praise while in
the throes of her cataclysmic labor. But just beyond the swinging door in the room
adjoining Operating Theater 3, the oversize autoclave (donated by the Lutheran church
in Zurich) bellowed and wept for my mother while its scalding steam sterilized the
surgical instruments and towels that would be used on her. After all, it was in the
corner of the autoclave room, right next to that stainless-steel behemoth, that my
mother kept a sanctuary for herself during the seven years she spent at Missing before
our rude arrival. Her one-piece desk-and-chair, rescued from a defunct mission school,
and bearing the gouged frustration of many a pupil, faced the wall. Her white cardigan,
which I am told she often slipped over her shoulders when she was between
operations, lay over the back of the chair.On the plaster above the desk my mother had
tacked up a calendar print of Bernini’s famous sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila. The
figure of St. Teresa lies limp, as if in a faint, her lips parted in ecstasy, her eyes
unfocused, lids half closed. On either side of her, a voyeuristic chorus peers down from
the prie-dieux. With a faint smile and a body more muscular than befits his youthful
face, a boy angel stands over the saintly, voluptuous sister. The fingertips of his left
hand lift the edge of the cloth covering her bosom. In his right hand he holds an arrow
as delicately as a violinist holds a bow.Why this picture? Why St. Teresa, Mother?As a
little boy of four, I took myself away to this windowless room to study the image.
Courage alone could not get me past that heavy door, but my sense that she was
there, my obsession to know the nun who was my mother, gave me strength. I sat next
to the autoclave which rumbled and hissed like a waking dragon, as if the hammering
of my heart had roused the beast. Gradually, as I sat at my mother’s desk, a peace
would come over me, a sense of communion with her.I learned later that no one had
dared remove her cardigan from where it sat draped on the chair. It was a sacred
object. But for a four-year-old, everything is sacred and ordinary. I pulled that
Cuticura-scented garment around my shoulders. I rimmed the dried-out inkpot with my
nail, tracing a path her fingers had taken. Gazing up at the calendar print just as she
must have while sitting there in that windowless room, I was transfixed by that image.
Years later, I learned that St. Teresa’s recurrent vision of the angel was called the
transverberation, which the dictionary said was the soul “inflamed” by the love of God,
and the heart “pierced” by divine love; the metaphors of her faith were also the
metaphors of medicine. At four years of age, I didn’t need words like “transverberation”
to feel reverence for that image. Without photographs of her to go by, I couldn’t help
but imagine that the woman in the picture was my mother, threatened and about to be
ravished by the spear-wielding boy-angel. “When are you coming, Mama?” I would ask,
my small voice echoing off the cold tile. When are you coming?I would whisper my
answer: “By God!” That was all I had to go by: Dr. Ghosh’s declaration the time I’d first
wandered in there and he’d come looking for me and had stared at the picture of St.
Teresa over my shoulders; he lifted me in his strong arms and said in that voice of his
that was every bit a match for the autoclave: “She is CUM-MING, by God!”FORTY-SIX
AND FOUR YEARS have passed since my birth, and miraculously I have the opportunity
to return to that room. I find I am too large for that chair now, and the cardigan sits
atop my shoulders like the lace amice of a priest. But chair, cardigan, and calendar print
of transverberation are still there. I, Marion Stone, have changed, but little else has.
Being in that unaltered room propels a thumbing back through time and memory. The
unfading print of Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa (now framed and under glass to preserve
what my mother tacked up) seems to demand this. I am forced to render some order to
the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened,
and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.WE COME
UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation,
misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found
my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as
much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but
subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others
will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.I chose the
specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and
adolescence. “What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?” she said when I went to
her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.I squirmed. How easily
Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. “Why must I do what is
hardest?””Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument
sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why
settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can play the ‘Gloria’?”How unfair of Matron to
evoke that soaring chorale which always made me feel that I stood with every mortal
creature looking up to the heavens in dumb wonder. She understood my unformed
character.”But, Matron, I can’t dream of playing Bach, the ‘Gloria’ …,” I said under my
breath. I’d never played a string or wind instrument. I couldn’t read music.”No, Marion,”
she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled hands rough on my cheeks. “No,
not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it,
ignoring what God made possible in you.”I was temperamentally better suited to a
cognitive discipline, to an introspective field–internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry.
The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused
coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could
imagine.And so I became a surgeon.Thirty years later, I am not known for speed, or
daring, or technical genius. Call me steady, call me plodding; say I adopt the style and
technique that suits the patient and the particular situation and I’ll consider that high
praise. I take heart from my fellow physicians who come to me when they themselves
must suffer the knife. They know that Marion Stone will be as involved after the surgery
as before and during. They know I have no use for surgical aphorisms such as “When in
doubt, cut it out” or “Why wait when you can operate” other than for how reliably they
reveal the shallowest intellects in our field. My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I
have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the one you
decide not to do.” Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head,
knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father’s caliber–that kind of
talent, that kind of “brilliance,” goes unheralded.On one occasion with a patient in grave
peril, I begged my father to operate. He stood silent at the bedside, his fingers lingering
on the patient’s pulse long after he had registered the heart rate, as if he needed the
touch of skin, the thready signal in the radial artery to catalyze his decision. In his taut
expression I saw complete concentration. I imagined I could see the cogs turning in his
head; I imagined I saw the shimmer of tears in his eyes. With utmost care he weighed
one option against another. At last, he shook his head, and turned away.I followed. “Dr.
Stone,” I said, using his title though I longed to cry out, Father! “An operation is his
only chance,” I said. In my heart I knew the chance was infinitesimally small, and the
first whiff of anesthesia might end it all. My father put his hand on my shoulder. He
spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. “Marion, remember
the Eleventh Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s
death.”I remember his words on full-moon nights in Addis Ababa when knives are
flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am standing in an
abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked with the grist and blood of
strangers. I remember. But you don’t always know the answers before you operate.
One operates in the now. Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and
pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M–morbidity and mortality
conference–will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live
it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear
that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.Now, in my fiftieth year, I venerate
the sight of the abdomen or chest laid open. I’m ashamed of our human capacity to
hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the
cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each
other under the dome of the diaphragm–these things leave me speechless. My fingers
“run the bowel” looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after
glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The gut that
has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape
of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the serpent’s head. But I do see the ordinary
miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there a
greater privilege on earth?At such moments I remember to thank my twin brother,
Shiva– Dr. Shiva Praise Stone–to seek him out, to find his reflection in the glass panel
that separates the two operating theaters, and to nod my thanks because he allows me
to be what I am today. A surgeon.According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing
holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. Fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it’s an
apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound
that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it
happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave
much unfinished for the next generation.Born in Africa, living in exile in America, then
returning at last to Africa, I am proof that geography is destiny. Destiny has brought
me back to the precise coordinates of my birth, to the very same operating theater
where I was born. My gloved hands share the space above the table in Operating
Theater 3 that my mother and father’s hands once occupied.Some nights the crickets
cry zaa-zee, zaa-zee, thousands of them drowning out the coughs and grunts of the
hyenas in the hillsides. Suddenly, nature turns quiet. It is as if roll call is over and it is
time now in the darkness to find your mate and retreat. In the ensuing vacuum of
silence, I hear the high-pitched humming of the stars and I feel exultant, thankful for
my insignificant place in the galaxy. It is at such times that I feel my indebtedness to
Shiva.Twin brothers, we slept in the same bed till our teens, our heads touching, our
legs and torsos angled away. We outgrew that intimacy, but I still long for it, for the
proximity of his skull. When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise, my first thought is
to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.What I owe Shiva most is this: to
tell the story. It is one my mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, did not reveal and my
fearless father, Thomas Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together. Only the
telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me. Yes, I have infinite faith in
the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two
brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning …
PART ONE… for the secret of the care of the patient
is in caring for the patient.Francis W. Peabody, October 21, 1925
CHAPTER 1
The Typhoid State Revisited
SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE had come to Missing Hospital from India, seven
years before our birth. She and Sister Anjali were the first novitiates of the Carmelite
Order of Madras to also go through the arduous nursing diploma course at the
Government General Hospital, Madras. On graduation day my mother and Anjali
received their nursing pins and that evening took their final vows of poverty celibacy,
and obedience. Instead of answering to “Probationer” (in the hospital) and “Novitiate”
(in the convent), they could now be addressed in both places as “Sister.” Their aged
and saintly abbess, Shessy Geevarughese, affectionately called Saintly Amma, had
wasted no time in giving the two young nurse-nuns her blessing, and her surprising
assignment: Africa.
On the day they were to sail, all the novitiates rode from the convent in a
caravan of cycle-rickshaws to the harbor to send off their two sisters. In my mind’s eye
I can see the novitiates lining the quay, chattering and trembling with excitement and
emotion, their white habits flapping in the breeze, the seagulls hopping around their
sandaled feet.
I have so often wondered what went through my mother’s mind as she and
Sister Anjali, both just nineteen years old, took their last steps on Indian soil and
boarded the Calangute. She would have heard stifled sobs and “God be with you” follow
her up the gangway. Was she fearful? Did she have second thoughts? Once before,
when she entered the convent, she’d torn herself away from her biological family in
Cochin forever and moved to Madras, which was a day and a night’s train ride from her
home. As far as her parents were concerned, it might just as well have been halfway
across the world, for they would never see her again. And now, after three years in
Madras, she was tearing herself away from the family of her faith, this time to cross an
ocean. Once again, there was no going back.
A few years before sitting down to write this, I traveled to Madras in search of
my mother’s story. In the archived papers of the Carmelites, I found nothing of hers,
but I did find Saintly Amma’s diaries in which the abbess recorded the passing days.
When the Calangute slipped its mooring, Saintly Amma raised her hand like a traffic
policeman and, “using my sermon voice which I am told belies my age,” intoned the
words, “Leave your land for my sake,” because Genesis was her favorite book. Saintly
Amma had given this mission great thought: True, India had unfathomable needs. But
that would never change and was no excuse; the two young nuns–her brightest and
fairest–were to be the torch-bearers: Indians carrying Christ’s love to darkest
Africa–that was her grand ambition. In her papers, she reveals her thinking: Just as the
English missionaries discovered when they came to India, there was no better way to
carry Christ’s love than through stupes and poultices, liniments and dressings, cleansing
and comfort. What better ministry than the ministry of healing? Her two young nuns
would cross the ocean, and then the Madras Discalced Carmelite Mission to Africa would
begin.
As the good abbess watched the two waving figures on the ship’s rail recede to
white dots, she felt a twinge of apprehension. What if by their blind obedience to her
grand scheme they were being condemned to a horrible fate? “The English missionaries
have the almighty Empire behind them … but what of my girls?” She wrote that the
seagulls’ shrill quarreling and the splatter of bird excreta had marred the grand send-off
she had envisioned. She was distracted by the overpowering scent of rotten fish, and
rotted wood, and by the bare-chested stevedores whose betel-nut-stained mouths
drooled bloody lechery at the sight of her brood of virgins.
“Father, we consign our sisters to You for safekeeping,” Saintly Amma said,
putting it on His shoulders. She stopped waving, and her hands found shelter in her
sleeves. “We beseech You for mercy and for Your protection in this outreach of the
Discalced Carmelites …”
It was 1947, and the British were finally leaving India; the Quit India Movement
had made the impossible come about. Saintly Amma slowly let the air out of her lungs.
It was a new world, and bold action was called for, or so she believed.
THE BLACK-AND-RED FLOATING PACKET of misery that called itself a ship
steamed across the Indian Ocean toward its destination, Aden. In its hold the Calangute
carried crate upon crate of spun cotton, rice, silk, Godrej lockers, Tata filing cabinets, as
well as thirty-one Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles, the engines wrapped in oilcloth. The
ship wasn’t …
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