ABSTRACT
This chapter is, in part, a response to an absence: my absence from this year’s Women’s Studies Network Conference. Along with Margrit Shildrick, Janet and I had planned to write and present a paper which, as one of its issues, discussed how the boundaries of what we call health are not as reliable as we would like them to be and how health, as a term, is achieved through the denial of its other, illness (Price and Shildrick, 1994). What I didn’t know, as we sat planning our argument, was that I was to discover this for myself in no uncertain terms only a few weeks later. In early June, I had what I think was flu, which seems to have triggered the symptoms that I was convinced I’d walked away from two years previously, and as a result I have been left with the difficult task of getting used to using a wheelchair again.
