Being bedridden and realizing that you still have a blog due by midnight is definitely not a great feeling. It does however, leave a lot of time to think about what people who are truly bedridden do in these sorts of time.
As I lay in bed, I recall NASA’s call for people to stay in Thankfully, Nasa’s got my back and someone has decided to document their journey of having been bedridden for 3 months. (http://www.vice.com/read/nasa-patient-8179-100) He explains that during the first couple days, his body was already experiencing difficulties with sleeping and removing excrements due to the lack of gravity. Helping to show that staying in bed for too long, can truly become detrimental to your health rather than becoming relaxing. Although NASA’s researchers had been trying to get Andrew Iwanicki to keep up with his physical abilities, being on your back for 3 months is definitely an unnatural change to be making as opposed to being on your feet. At the same time, I was wondering how important it must have been to document his journey through what he thought was a gift, but turned out to be worse than he could have imagined.
It’s come to my attention that blogging about your ailments has actually become somewhat of a trend where bloggers, for example: http://dailylifewithchronicillness.tumblr.com/ would document how many illnesses they had accumulated. I was led to an entire community of people who were blogging their journeys through their illnesses. People were sharing their everyday lives, as with any form of blogging, but were specific in providing details of their progress or checkups at the clinic. Researchers such as Anthony McCosker, (http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view%20Article/104/0) could explain the significance of having a blog to document their journey as being crucial for creating a new identity for oneself in a time in which their lives may have been completely changed.
I’ve been resisting the urge to post on Facebook and other social media (excluding this) but have you felt the need to tweet, update your friends on Facebook about how sick you’ve been feeling?
-Kacey Ng