The Relentless Cost of Chronic Diseases

At first, my legs buckled. Then I started nearly fainting and was struck by fierce jaw, neck, and back pain—six unhappy faces-worth on the scale.  Just as quickly, as one tends to do, I created narratives to explain these sudden symptoms. That one glass of wine had done me in. The steamy weather led my knees to wobble. It was the aftermath of a concussion I got after I fell in a hole in the sidewalk. It was from when I hurt my neck when I was thrown down on a subway platform by a man with low spatial awareness and somewhere to be. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It turned out I was fainting because I had gotten COVID-19 for the second and then the third time and now had Long COVID, although it took six months for the doctors to arrive at this conclusion. It seems I had fallen prey to what I call “gray diseases”—the post-viral, hormonal, autoimmune or psychological conditions like PTSD that have unclear shapes, multiple possible cures, or no cure at all. (In addition to Long COVID, think Lyme, endometriosis, and chronic pain.) After months of waiting in agony during which I couldn’t work at my ordinary pace, I realized that my experience was not separate from my work as the director of a poverty reporting organization but referred back to my job explicitly. In fact, I was standing directly in an area of inequality that receives too little attention: the sheer number of people with gray diseases that aren’t getting the c...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news