February Shell Exchange

Welcome to the February 2025 Shell Exchange!

Midway through each month, I drop a list of recommended reads. I try to feature winning hermit crab essays (🦀) when possible. But those charming crabbies aren’t always easy to find. So I also make it a point to share pieces on invisible illness.

If you come across an essay or article I haven’t mentioned that you feel warrants attention, drop the link in the comments, and I’ll add it to the rotation next month.

1. “The Switzerland Schedule” by Robin Williamson from The Audacity

“‘After taking Sodium Pentobarbital,’ reads a letter we received from Dignitas, ‘the person will fall asleep within two to five minutes, slipping into a deep coma.’ A luxurious death, if there can be such a thing. ‘Only after the person is completely unconscious does the Sodium Pentobarbital affect the respiration, which becomes weaker and finally stops.’ Once asleep, it would take my mother between twenty minutes and one hour to die.”

2. “My Autism has a Mighty Appetite” by [sarah] Cavar from Electric Lit

“My autism is gentle, yet growing
carnivorous.
Like Medusa, my autism is something you maybe shouldn’t see, but if you do, you should
write a book about.”

3. “Dissolution Foretold: Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh on the Reality of His Own Diagnosis” by Henry Marsh from LitHub

“Perhaps I thought that seeing my own brain would confirm the fascination with neuroscience that had led me to become a neurosurgeon in the first place, and that it would fill me with a feeling of the sublime. But it was vanity. I had blithely assumed that the scan would show that I was one of the small number of older people whose brains show little sign of aging.”

4. “Nobody has My Condition But Me” by Beverly Gage from The New Yorker

“All of which makes me lucky, in one respect. Far too often, women who present with hard-to-diagnose illnesses are told that the symptoms are no big deal, that the problem is in their head. They spend years going from doctor to doctor, in a desperate search for someone, anyone, who’s willing to help. This has not been my experience. From the first, doctors took my condition seriously, sometimes more seriously than I did. They pushed me along to the nation’s greatest experts, at the finest medical institutions. My insurance paid large sums for tests and treatments; my family and friends were patient and supportive. All the while, I was able to keep doing what needed to be done: write a book, raise a child, teach my classes.”

5. “The Cause of Depression is Probably Not What You Think” by Joanna Thompson from Quanta Magazine

“Yet the causes of depression go far beyond serotonin deficiency. Clinical studies have repeatedly concluded that the role of serotonin in depression has been overstated. Indeed, the entire premise of the chemical-imbalance theory may be wrong, despite the relief that Prozac seems to bring to many patients.”

6. “Women Have Been Misled About Menopause” by Susan Dominus from The New York Times

“About 85 percent of women experience menopausal symptoms. Rebecca Thurston, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who studies menopause, believes that, in general, menopausal women have been underserved — an oversight that she considers one of the great blind spots of medicine. ‘It suggests that we have a high cultural tolerance for women’s suffering,’ Thurston says. ‘It’s not regarded as important.’”

7. “Things That Able Me” by Christy Tending from Longreads

“These accommodations — and others I require but have not named — are not merely comfortable, but necessary, an antidote to the ways the world, as it is, dis-ables me. The way the world tries to tell me that simple pleasures do not belong to me. Due to the burdensome inefficiencies of my body, I deserve exclusion.”

8. “After ‘losing my life’ caring for a sick partner, a professor examines the U.S. caregiver crisis” by Isabella Cueto from Stat

“There’s an infinite number of impairments because our bodies can go haywire in an infinite number of ways. But it’s how society treats you based on that impairment status. It doesn’t matter if it’s episodic, progressive, or static, where it’s sort of the same all the time. That impairment, in the eyes of others or in our systems — like Social Security Administration or whatever the system is that you must check boxes — you then become subject to systems that are about excluding and managing disabled people. You may not say, ‘I identify as a disabled person,” but you’re treated in these systems as such.’”

9. “On the Uncertain Border Between Writing and Therapy” by Veronica Esposito from LitHub

“In researching this piece, I found something interesting: many creative writers and scientific researchers have explored the question of how creative writing may or may not be therapy, but I could not find anyone who had posed the question in the other direction: what impact therapy may have on one’s creative writing.”

10. “The Future of Long COVID” by Katherine J. Wu from The Atlantic

“But for all the ground that’s been gained, the road ahead is arduous. Long COVID still lacks a universal clinical definition and a standard diagnosis protocol; there’s no consensus on its prevalence, or even what symptoms fall under its purview. Although experts now agree that long COVID does not refer to a single illness, but rather is an umbrella term, like cancer, they disagree on the number of subtypes that fall within it and how, exactly, each might manifest.”