September Shell Exchange

Welcome to the September 2022 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 I don’t mention that you feel warrants attention, drop the link in the comments, and I’ll add it to the rotation next month.

1. The Two Sides of American Health Care by Jodie Noel Vinson

“My elation over a broken humerus may have seemed strange to those crowded around the X-ray, but I was simply relieved to know what was wrong and what had to be done. For the past year, I’d sought just such a decisive prognosis for ongoing symptoms that followed a Covid infection, only to be dismissed by doctors. Back then, chest pains sent my stomach plummeting to the floor, shocks shooting through my arms with a sensation of slipping on ice: an involuntary, internal reaction telling my body to right itself, to find help. Something was broken. We still don’t understand what.”

2. There’s Nothing Simple About Chronic Conditions. A Complexity Researcher has Some Ideas to Improve Care by Isabella Cueto

“And then you start getting into realizing that actually, patients’ lives are made complex by all kinds of systems around them: their family, their work life, their work history, their lived history, and health care, too. How we deliver health care can really either make it a little easier for a person to manage things or a little more difficult. Health care can be accessible and it can be well-designed or it can be less so. And to the degree that it is less so, that means that even if a person really wants to take care of their health, health care is just adding more uncertainty into that person’s life.”

3. The Rest Room by Natasha Lipman

“There’s so much simple advice that most patients do not receive that could help them better understand their health, their body, and how to safely and sustainably find ways of living with often challenging and debilitating conditions. I didn’t really get it when I needed it, and when I finally did, it changed my life.”

4. Sisters Making Dinner by Sarah Leavens

“The air in this moment hangs open, broad as a canyon between us. I have more years, but have laid eyes on only a few corpses. Have never sponged one, nor turned its arm over to ease out the tubes, nor held a conversation with it a moment earlier. My understanding of eternity is as small as a gasp of breath.”

5. One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms is Also Its Most Misunderstood by Ed Yong

“They found that even mild infections can slightly shrink the brain and reduce the thickness of its neuron-rich gray matter. At their worst, these changes were comparable to a decade of aging. They were especially pronounced in areas such as the parahippocampal gyrus, which is important for encoding and retrieving memories, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is important for executive function. They were still apparent in people who hadn’t been hospitalized. And they were accompanied by cognitive problems.”