Reading Response #1
The online community Wu is trying to portray are people who are looking for answers. They express their concerns and their urgent need for answers especially from the doctor they are asking. The verbal portrait she creates of this community are concerned people. They go through their loved ones having FD and looking for answers to help cure them. With the doctor’s responses, some of them are sort of helpless. For example, the doctor in one of the posts answering back to an individual says that the person thinking they have the illness has to accept it and go for treatment themselves. The sources she uses are real life people who are actually going through it themselves. She takes tracks of the dates and how it was asked. She also records how the doctor responds and if the doctor seems as if the only way to cure the disease is for the people to accept their stage and get the help they need. The role that footnotes plays in her finding is that they keep track of the peoples comments she reads and what may be important to her. She singles out the things that are important or that she associates with herself with. Wu compares herself a lot to what she reads and she is concerned about what damage she causes herself and she appreciates that she is actually realizing the harm she is doing her body. When she came to realize she had FD she wanted to have high chances of having a good outcome.