February 2024 Shell Exchange

Welcome to the February 2024 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. “How to Comment on Social Media” by Rebecca Solnit from LitHub 🦀

“2) All of the O.P.’s feelings, experiences, interpretations, and values should be in the first sentence anyway. Only fascists hide those things in militarized outposts throughout the terrain of the piece. Which are basically ambushes. Which is violent and elitist.”

2. “America’s Health System Isn’t Ready for the Surge of Seniors With Disabilities” by Judith Graham from KFF Health News

“In survey results published in 2021, 82% of physicians admitted they believed people with significant disabilities have a worse quality of life than those without impairments. Only 57% said they welcomed disabled patients.”

3. “How Chronic Pain Changed My Writing Process” by Heather Sweeney from Brevity

“Living with chronic pain started to affect every aspect of my life, from increasing the amount of breaks I had to take at my work-from-home day job, to decreasing social events, exercise, and time for my personal writing. My invisible illness was not only challenging to explain to family and friends, but it was also forcing me to accept my new limitations.”

4. “Could long Covid’s signs of immune dysregulation in the blood lead to a diagnostic test?” by Elizabeth Cooney from STAT

“These biomarkers appeared after the researchers performed high-throughput analyses of more than 6,500 proteins found in the blood serum of 113 people infected with Covid, including 40 people who developed long Covid, and controls who were not infected.”

5. “Long COVID Study Suggests Immune System Response at Root of Persistent Symptoms” by Kelby Vera from HuffPost

“As the complement system remains active without COVID to fight, it ‘starts damaging healthy cells,’ according to Dr. Onur Boyman, a professor of immunology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and one of the study’s authors.”

*Yes, basically referring to the same study as above, but written for a different audience.

6. “Writing an Illness Story that Rejects the Inspirational Healing Narrative” by Alexandra Middleton from Electric Literature

“I remember reading and feeling, ‘Wait. Am I not okay then? Have I just not been able to get over it?’ Because it had been ten years since I was seriously ill and I still hadn’t fully left the ghost of that illness behind. The publishing industry, historically or culturally, has valued narratives where the person is an inspiration at the end. I resisted that and thought, how could I write a narrative about not being fully healed or on the other side with your feet firmly planted in able-bodiedness again?”

7. “Can autoimmune diseases be cured? Scientists see hope at last” by Cassandra Willyard from Nature

“The immune system is known for its role in attacking pathogens. But it has another, equally important job: knowing when to stand down. If immune cells see the body’s own tissues as a threat, they can cause harm.”

8. “Childless” by Kristen Gentry from raising mothers

“A visit to the gynecologist led to another visit for an ultrasound. Lying on the table watching the sonographer apply the cold gel to my flat stomach and scan the black screen of my womb, empty of a baby but full of polyps, almost made me cry. The scene was so far from the joyous moments I’d seen in movies and imagined for myself. I was, indeed, part of the problem.”

9. “New chronic Covic study offers insight into which immunocompromised patients are most at risk” by Elizabeth Cooney from STAT

“Immunocompromised patients are the folks who are at greatest risk, so they can be a driver of evolution. But an immunocompromised state is not a yes-no situation. It represents a broad spectrum of disorders and you need a large enough cohort to really be able to categorize these individuals into the varying strata for risk.”

10. “Family Day at the Psych Ward” by Michael Cannistraci from Longridge Review

“I knocked and Steve opened the door. He was so manic I could feel the energy pulsing out of him. He greeted me with delight as if I was his long-lost brother; this was always the way of it. He never had any memory of his actions, whether it was stealing from me or insulting me in front of a friend. After the mania ended, he had amnesia and couldn’t understand why nobody would talk to him.”

11. “The Census Bureau is dropping a controversial proposal to change disability statistics” by Hansi Lo Wang from NPR

“To align with international standards and produce more detailed data about people's disabilities, the bureau had proposed a new set of questions that would have asked people to rate their level of difficulty with certain activities.”

12. “I hate the Barbie movie, and it’s because I’m 44” by Anna Rawhiti-Connell from The Spinoff

“In the early months of 2023, I regularly found myself profoundly and suddenly irritated with an insatiable urge to break plates and jugs in order to reach the silent aftermath. Everything irritated me in ways that weren’t fair. People who didn’t indicate while driving were monstrous, and this common lack of driving etiquette spawned anxious ruminations about civilised society.”

13. “Could testosterone be a useful treatment for menopause?” by Annalisa Merelli from STAT

“There are some crucial differences in how estrogen and testosterone work in women’s bodies. Estrogen fluctuates during the menstrual cycle, but it’s produced consistently by the ovaries and adrenal glands until menopause. Then its production decreases quite dramatically, causing a wide range of symptoms that are debilitating for many women, such as hot flashes, mental health issues, and sleep problems. Women’s testosterone levels, on the other hand, peak when they are in their teens and 20s. They go down gradually afterward, without a similarly drastic drop.”

14. “Flying Solo” by Kristina Kasparian from Longreads

“But the weed inside me tethered my organs and bound my ship to its anchor. It suffocated the independence that pulsed through me since I last stood in Milan. I went from winning more scholarships than I could accept to watching my savings dissolve into medical debt. I walked out on a dream career in academia after my PhD and became self-employed to give myself breathing room between surgeries—a ‘choice’ my Italian supervisor called a real shame for the field that had invested in me.”