Monday, November 27, 2023

The Train Wrecked in Slow Motion

In this harrowing essay for Slate, ER doctor Grace Glassman recounts the birth of her third child, a daughter, and the risks involved with pregnancy at age 45. In a piece that is a master class in pacing, Glassman remembers her uncontrollable bleeding post C-section and going into hemorrhagic shock that required life-saving emergency surgery. In reflecting on her experience as a medical doctor, she suggests that only one thing stood between life and death: pure luck.

The anesthesiologist returned. “I don’t get your pressures. They don’t reflect how you look.”

In her defense, I did feel well, even though my blood pressure was abysmal.

“We could put in an arterial line and then we’d know for sure,” she said. She was referring to a small wire with a sensor that gets placed in an artery, a more accurate gauge of blood pressure than a cuff. “But it hurts. I don’t think we’ll do that.”

I disagreed. Just put in the damn line, I thought. She was slight, with brown hair in an unfussy bob. She wore dark tortoiseshell glasses. She moved slowly, catlike, and seemed not too concerned. I worried that she wasn’t more worried. It was the emergency doc in me, always defaulting to the worst possible outcome, I told myself. I reminded myself that this was not my show.

She decided instead to transfuse more units of blood and start pressors, medicines that boost blood pressure. Blood pressure can drop for many reasons—a hemorrhage, an infection, a reaction to medication, a compromised heart. Pressors divert blood to the vital organs, such as the heart and the brain, at the expense of body parts that can be sacrificed, like the arms and legs.

Pressors are the mark of a critically ill patient.



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Friday, November 24, 2023

Last Love: a Romance in a Care Home

A beautiful, moving piece about love in old age. Sophie Elmhirst draws you in from the first sentence and keeps you hooked with her quick-fire sentences. It’s an essay to make you both smile and cry.

It’s not entirely clear when this was. Two years ago, maybe three? Timings, the order of things, time in general, can be confusing. But there are some things we know for sure. Mary is Mary Turrell, nearly 80 years old. She had been living at Easterlea Rest Home in Denmead, near Portsmouth, for a little while, a year or two, perhaps, when the man with the voice arrived. And his name was Derek Brown.



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Sick City

Writer Katie Mulkowsky’s father grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City—specifically, the Bronx that Moses all but destroyed in his quest to remake the metropolis in his image. Now an urban planner, Mulkowsky considers how Moses shaped both her dad’s life and her own:

We lost my dad last year: the denouement in a courageously fought cancer battle that spanned more than two decades. I was 24 when he died—not as young as I could have been, but not old enough to negate a dull, almost-always-there sense of missing something. He was unpretentious, unfashionable, unfailingly reliable. He was corny and funny and sentimental. He was a rare combination of impossibly hard-working and deeply empathetic: a respiratory therapist for many years, he was an asthmatic who helped people breathe. We won’t ever be able to say for certain whether his lifelong lung issues, and lengthy scrimmage with the carcinomas, were caused by his exposure to harmful pollutants alone. But we’d be foolish to say that the environment he was raised in had no bearing on his wellbeing—or that of his dad, or brother, or niece and nephew, or those other 33.3 per cent of Bronx residents who die prematurely, a rate substantially higher than in New York City (26.2 per cent) or New York State (23.4 per cent).

Beyond being a daughter, I’m now a practising urban planner, and was trained by mentors with a keen eye on the link between public space and public health. Thanks to a slew of writers, scholars and activists—like Robert D Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie (1990), Julie Sze, author of Noxious New York (2006) and Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space (2008), particularly Chapter 4, ‘Choking Cities’—it’s well documented that environmental issues have unequal human impacts. Certain populations, based on their location, demographic makeup, level of resources available and underlying political context, feel the effects of industrial pollution more than others. This often has to do with the fact that histories of social and economic disenfranchisement become mapped on to urban space through planning practices like redlining and zoning. Along with the South Bronx, neighbourhoods like Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Manhattan’s West Harlem today have higher geographic concentrations of polluting infrastructure, such as major highways, power plants, incinerators and waste transfer stations, than their wealthier counterparts do—predisposing some of the city’s poorest and most diverse communities to the worst health outcomes. Knowing this, on a professional and a personal level, has compounded the magnitude of my grief with the exasperation of having seen something coming for a long time.



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Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Rebuilding Myself After Brain Injury

How does it feel to lose the ability to conjure the right words? Kelly Barnhill explains the long, difficult process of recovering from a brain injury in this moving essay on loss—and resilience.

Healing from any injury is a process of rebuilding cells and tissues and structures — taking that which is broken and making it new again. Healing a brain injury is the process of rebuilding not only tissues and cells and the connections between those cells, but also memory, thoughts, imagination, the fundamentals of language and our very concept of ourselves.



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Ice Cream, Alone and with Others

In this beautiful essay at Ruby Literary Magazine, poet Terry Kirts explores the deep pleasures of ice cream, whether by observing a stranger enjoy a cone or by eating it himself.

It’s just that, of all foods, ice cream seems a communal one, whose flavor is intensified by the visual and auditory exuberance of those you’re sharing it with. Birthday parties, barn raisings, summer socials. “I scream, you scream, we all scream. . .”

I know I will not write about it, except to tell you there are sorrows even ice cream cannot drive off, though I hope there is someone to share yours with every time you eat it.



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Tuesday, November 21, 2023

A Hiker and a Terrier Climbed a Peak. The Dog Came Home 72 Days Later.

Richard Moore, an avid outdoorsman, vanished this past August while hiking with his dog on Blackhead Peak, a 12,500-foot mountain in Colorado. Miraculously Finney, his Jack Russell Terrier, survived and was rescued 72 days later. For Outside, Frederick Dreier tries to figure out what happened.

The sheriff’s office has yet to publish an official cause of death, but rescuers told Holby that Moore had likely died of hypothermia and exposure. He was lost, stranded on a steep ridge on the eastern side of the peak, far from the trail. He had smashed his glasses and probably could not see where he was going. His body was about 500 yards from the farthest boundary of the search.

Holby has a final theory of how her dog made it through the ordeal, one that she thinks about on lonely afternoons. From her living room in Pagosa Springs, Holby can look out her windows and across the valley to the east and see the scraggly profile of Blackhead Peak rising in the distance.

“I keep feeling as though she was sent to me by Rich,” Holby says, “Who probably told her to go home and take care of me.”



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Monday, November 20, 2023

Studying the Swarm

In this beautiful essay at Maisonneuve, Kate Barss considers the mating and family habits of bees in examining the societal barriers and prejudices she and her partner Bear must navigate as a lesbian couple trying to start a family.

First, a young queen flies two to three kilometres from her hive. It’s a rare moment of solitude—the only time in her life she’s alone. Aside from this flight and to swarm, she never leaves the hive. If she dies, her hive risks dying too, each generation depending on her to reproduce; aside from a few exceptions, the queen is the only reproductive female bee in the hive. Once she reaches the drone gathering area, usually open airspace above a visibly-distinct landmark (perhaps a boulder or a steeple) she mates with ten to twenty drones, or male bees. With this act, the queen packs a lifetime of sperm into her spermatheca — a small pearl-shaped organ located just above her poison sac and stinger. She never has to mate again and, over her two-to-five-year lifespan, will lay 150,000 eggs from spring to fall, hatching into about 1,500 bees per day. During sex, the drone’s phallus explodes, killing him immediately. His purpose singular and disposable, his role complete.

I don’t want sperm delivered like UberEats or bartered for a bottle of rosé on local trade groups — but I do wonder about creating a more collective model of sperm and egg donation. Like my own potential family, honeybees also select one individual to reproduce on the families’ behalf — millenia has taught bees that it is advantageous to divide up this labour. The queen becomes a queen by being fed extra royal jelly: a protein-rich secretion made from digested pollen and honey. These extra delicious helpings let her reproductive system fully form, unlike worker bees, which don’t have complete reproductive systems. They share the rest of the labour. In Canada, queer men are prohibited from donating sperm in the same way that they were banned from donating blood — no dice unless you’ve been abstinent for three months, even if you’re in a long-term monogamous relationship. This denial seems like a missed opportunity — there is a long history of queer people helping each other start families, a sense of reciprocity and generosity that goes beyond heteropatriarchal norms.



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