Separation, repair, dismantling, recognition

Today I underwent (not a verb part which I often use, but it seems apt) a laparoscopic bilateral inguinal hernia repair. Like so many friends, I cannot speak highly enough of the way the NHS performed when it came to the crunch. Everyone treated me with both professionalism and humanity: the Polish anaesthetist, the Indian surgeon, the Scottish and Lancashire nurses. I felt utterly cared for throughout the process, and also treated as a person. Axel Honneth distinguishes three modes of recognition: love and care, rights and respect, esteem and solidarity. Today I was cared for as someone with needs, respected as a person with rights, and valued for my contribution - eg people were interested in my work. (I was also efficiently and tenderly cared for when I returned home, for which I am grateful.)

A hernia occurs when layers of the abdominal muscle wall become detached and weakened. The remedy is to push (from the outside, via open surgery) or draw (from the inside, via keyhole surgery) the layers back together and fix a mesh to the muscle wall to strengthen it. If not treated the hernia can become painful or, worse, 'strangulated'. This is when a length of intestine pushes through so far that it becomes cut off; very painful, requiring emergency intervention. I went for a planned early intervention, before I ever had any discomfort.

It was only this evening that I realised today was also Yawm an-Nakba, or Day of the Catastrophe), when Palestinians remember the violent end of the British Mandate in 1948, when they became separated from much of their homeland. Israel, on the other hand, marks the 14 May as Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut), but it's an independence that is currently built on pain and paranoia. The multiple separations that occurred then, and have continued since, are proving far harder to repair than my hernia (and it's hard to see how a keyhole approach might work, but maybe worth thinking about). Many things would need to be dismantled carefully - from settlements to constitutions to corrupt semi-Authorities.

Meanwhile the National Health Service that delivered so well for me today is itself being dismantled, by people who think they know better, whose friends stand to gain personally by it, and who have no democratic mandate for what they are doing. Now that's something that needs emergency repair.