Freeing Palestine will Free us all: An American Crip Perspective on Breaking Rules Towards Better Futures

By Kennedy Dawson Healy 

Content warning: hospitalization, pain, surgery, disability, abuse, suicide, care, genocide, Palestine 

On April 22, I slept in my electric wheelchair at one of the best hospitals in the world – Chicago’s Northwestern Medicine. I have nine doctors through this medical system. It seems as though I am reminded how well ranked the hospital is every time I enter, get an e-mail from them, login to my online portal. Unfortunately for the medical establishment, Crips are done with surveys and letters when institutions with this level of renown and arrogance fuck us. Following Alice Wong, disability media trailblazer, we’re writing articles. Her work on medical mistreatment can be read here, here, and here.   

I was at the hospital for a second procedure (the first from 2021) to remove kidney and bladder stones caused by my catheter. The catheter is a device I elected to have surgically implanted due to a lack of in-home care and accessible public restrooms. My doctor didn’t prescribe an antibiotic irrigation that could have prevented this because it is difficult to get insurance to cover it. Insurance crack down on disability products has escalated throughout my life. 

Still the privilege of having access to a medical procedure where, with minimal pain, my doctor entered my bladder and kidney through my urethra is not lost on me. Especially after watching, from on the ground accounts like Bisan’s, hospitals in Gaza being blown to bits for months. People giving birth and getting amputations without pain medication or anesthesia. But genocide cannot become our baseline. 

My procedure is not as invasive as the first. They consult my pulmonologist this time to get me the correct anesthesia for my neuromuscular disease. The procedure goes really well but is still hard on my lungs. I had been denied a private recovery room and the use of high quality masks for COVID prevention. I have to constantly advocate for staff to wear surgical masks.  

I have been asking for these measures for weeks, as well as a pressure relieving bed for recovery overnight. This is the only kind of bed I have slept on for the last 12 years. I am moved from the cot, to an OR table, to a standard hospital bed. I am kept in recovery and told my bed is being cleaned for around 6 hours. I opted to be alone because that was about how long it took me to wake up last time with the bad anesthesia. I was only notified I would be staying overnight four days before the procedure. While the hospital provides inadequate care, the state will not provide care services to anyone while they’re hospitalized. 

That morning, when we asked what time I would be able to access the good bed, my care worker and I snickered at the anesthesiologist saying it depended on “bed flow.” This is when I should have known I was screwed. I was on hard surfaces for 14 hours. I am transferred to my room and told I will get my bed there. My fat, gimpy body is more than ready for it. My healing requires my blood to flow. The pain from the bed is worse than the pain from the surgery despite both being masked by pain meds. Last time my bed was ready in my room. This time I am told it needs 12 hours to inflate and it is unlikely I will get it at all. 

It is nearly 10:00 p.m. I have been at the hospital since 8:00 a.m. and got very little sleep the night before. I try rolling on my side. It is worse. I know that I am likely already marked crazy for my persistent mask requests. And, well, Audre Lorde tells us that our silence will not protect us. I leave my call button on. I yell from the room, pitted against other patients in pain. “Help. I need help.” I say I want to sleep in my wheelchair. I want to go home. Non-gimps who get this procedure are not required to stay overnight. They tell me my chair is a fall risk. I cannot walk. It has a recline feature, a seatbelt. I have never fallen out of my wheelchair on flat ground. I tell them this. I call the care worker who has my van, who was up at 4:00am to get me there for $17.25/hr. No answer. I call my mom who lives out of state. A social worker mother hits different when you’re 29 and she’s 63, but it's worth a shot. Institutions need to know when we have people outside who are paying attention. She tries to call the nurses station on two different phones but never gets through. 

I call my care worker who is watching my cat to come up to the hospital. Their Uber from my house works faster than any actual results from the call button. They bring our friend who is with them and they begin putting the sling to my Hoyer lift underneath me, the first step in transferring me. Suddenly, a remote for the bed I am in Tylenol, water, and chapstick I’d been waiting hours for are now available to me. The nurse asks what we’re doing. I ask the nurse, who is waiting on approval from the doctor for each of my requests, if my friends transferring me reduces her liability. She says no. I say pretend I didn’t say that then. Realizing we’re going to do it anyway, the nurses come in and put me in my chair. It is relief to institutional abuse. 

Medical settings are made for dealing with and erasing disability, but are never prepared for it. Staff are touted as heroes for managing the people no one else wants to, but don’t have the resources to properly do so. This is the latest in a line of my medical trauma. Trauma that runs as deep as early 2000s x-ray rooms I can barely remember in the Children’s Hospital where I was born and received much of my pediatric “care” in Omaha, Nebraska. This was neither my best nor worst medical experience. My medical and care chaos is normal Crip stuff. While my needs are high, they’re balanced with access to some care, insurance, social capital, family support, racial and class privilege, etc. None of these systemic problems are new – ableism is foundational to medicine. 

And yet there was a time when things seemed to be getting better for some people. Under Obama, I had a political coming up in disability rights and justice movements with Crips that would tout our “lives worth living.” I even got roped into a Not Dead Yet action once where we used our wheelchairs to trap eugenicist doctors in an Embassy Suites. Conversations about Crip death were slippery slopes. These days, I have as many friends who want to be dead as I do friends who want to be alive. The hospital reminds me why. Pain and mistreatment makes it hard to have perspective around possibility. Much of this seemed to begin when disabled people, and other marginalized groups like service workers and BIPOC communities, were made the collateral damage of the pandemic. Collapsing home care and health care systems on top of this make living hard, while tens of billions of dollars are sent to Israel to carry out atrocities. I’ve been afloat since I got a vaccine and a cat, but some days I get not wanting be here. Most days I just want everyone to survive. Throughout my 20s, I’ve learned to look people who taught me how to be a political Crip in the eyes and say, sometimes through tears, “I can’t do this without you.” 

“I’m so glad you’re here.” 

“We need you. Let’s stay and fight.” 

I know when the time comes, I will do whatever I can to help them die in their homes with dignity, not in an institution. It’s Crip code. Never in their own shit, call button unanswered. I will learn to say, “Thank you for all you’ve done.” 

“Thank you for staying as long as you did.” 

It’s not mine to determine, but I don’t think it’s time yet. I know that, like everyone, eventually my time will come too. Crips have a lot of pride but we also have a lot of experience with and proximity to death. I know I would not last long in conditions like those the U.S. and Israel are subjecting millions of Palestinians to, or in a climate induced crisis here. When my youngest care worker (who saved me up above) pitches building animal bladder pressure relief beds if war and climate ruin our electric systems (look what we have done to the brains of young people, y’all!), I tell them they will have to leave me and save the world. 

But these futures are still ours to write. 

Whether genocide is occuring in Gaza is not an argument I will entertain (do y’all hear yourselves??). The obvious relationships between Palestine and disability have been well documented (see here and here). At times, Americans die of COVID at a weekly rate of death that occurs over 2-3 days in Gaza. Facism builds on itself. Cop cities. Anti-trans legislation. Overturning of abortion. Freeing us all begins with freeing Palestine. When they come to save me in the hospital, my friend tells me about the first of growing faculty support for college protests for Palestine, including groups forming a circle around their students, holding hands, protecting them, and getting arrested. I cry. I say, “That’s really good news.” Encampments across the country form as I recover at home. Northwestern University is one of them. I wonder what ties my medical care has to genocides. A sign in my room said that Northwestern was an institution of health and healing. Abuse and intimidation will not be tolerated.     

Right before my surgery, another care worker sent me a Tik Tok about breaking small rules so we can learn to break big ones. Of course, everyone’s positionality and experience informs their ability to take risks. I am grateful for the Crip practice in this. 

I am not leaving unless. 

I am leaving against medical advice unless. 

I’ll be happy to talk to you about those risks once you put me in my wheelchair. 

People pleasing as a survival mechanism has its ends. If you grew up othered, it can be hard to mark yourself other. But what if we leaned into the ways that we already are? What if we dealt with our shit so we could deal honestly with the world? What rules - big and small - can you break for Palestine? Like the students and faculty across the country, the bay area organizers who blocked the bridge and threw their car keys in the water, bus drivers that refused to support a pro-Israel protest in Detroit, global movements of port and transport workers refusing to handle or move weapons heading to Israel, the countless people who have lost or left their jobs. These are just some examples. 

Like the actions of the students in encampments, our actions for Palestine will likely continue to be met with much support and resistance. Like many other schools, my alma mater, DePaul University, ordered police to brutalize its own students and destroy their encampment rather than divesting from companies that support Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. I am reminded of something my former professor, H Rakes, taught me at a 2014 divestment action there:

There are more of us. 

You are allowed to take care of yourself AND collective care is going to get us so much farther. A lot of brave people are risking their futures AND all of our futures are at risk if we continue to normalize mass death. We did not individually do this AND we cannot allow it to continue. 

The world is burning. Break all the rules. For the love of god, put on a mask. Shave your head, tell your crush you're crushing, look at people longer, kiss each other on the forehead, laugh, sing, dance, cry, grieve, be grateful to be together, clasp hands, link arms, and do whatever you can to stop this. We do not have to accept any of it.   

This piece was written by our founder, Kennedy Dawson Healy. Read more about her on our team page.