Meditation on New Language

I need a new language to express my feelings when I read headlines like this on respected medical websites:

Surgery in Drug-Resistant Children? It's Worth It!

I imagine a group of marketers and branders, the people a medical consortium has hired to spice up language, maybe make it more upbeat or appealing in the way that television ads for drugs show people running through fields of flowers even as a litany of side effects are listed. Perhaps these people -- the ones in the rooms brainstorming, the editors of medical websites -- not the ones running through fields or having seizures or being constipated -- are the same experts who come up with pharmaceutical drug names -- Lyrica to conjure soothing musical notes instead of addiction or constant diarrhea or Banzel with its suggestion of a premier fashion house for accessories instead of an antiepileptic whose side effects include increased seizures and psychotic behavior. How about Fycompa with that tiny little nod to coma, like Fie On That Seizure-Induced Coma! Its side effects include increasing belligerent behavior and aggression, even homicidal ideation.

There's the language assigned to pharmaceutical side effects: irritability for psychotic, behavioral disturbances for head-banging or clawing one's skin to blood, increased secretions for drooling cups of liquid, and insomnia for never sleeping again.

Drug-resistant children is a phrase that implicates the child, doesn't it? It smoothes out the anxiety and insanity inherent and provoked by an inefficient treatment. It's language that covers for hideous drugs that don't work for shit to control seizures in children.

The degradation of language.

No more plums in the icebox. This is just to say.

How casual it all sounds, in this, arguably, well-intended iteration.

Brian Surgery!

It’s worth it!

There shouldn't be exclamation marks after brain surgery but rather a new sign from a new language that amplifies cutting into the brain of your child and removing a part of it, her, him, they.

Actually, I don’t need a new language to describe my feelings. You can probably surmise them. No probably. You surmise them. Your gift for recognizing irony is intact, Reader, if you’ve been coming here a while.  

We need a new language to discuss these medical things.  

We need a new language to express things like brain surgery for children — a language that could encompass possibility, gravity, and hope but also fuckery and absurdity. 

Also, specificity.

The possibility, gravity, fuckery, absurdity and hope of brain surgery.

so much depends upon a red wheel

barrow glazed with rain water beside the

white chickens

William Carlos Williams