Oct 07, 2020
On Sharks, Sickness, and Swimming Anyway
Nora Feely on cancer, facing her fears by naming them, and navigating a world filled with sharks
Nora Feely on cancer, facing her fears by naming them, and navigating a world filled with sharks
Estrogen and testosterone have historically been deployed to produce gender compliant citizens. What if, instead, they were agents of autonomy?
It goes like this: sit with the thought, don’t move your fingers, arms, legs, let it enter you, let it stay, let it leave.
On some level, we all know: Everyone who is etched into our being will one day vanish.
Living with mental illness is a constant cycle of wellness and illness, and each recovery is impermanent.
On the heels of my diagnosis, I feel there is no way to construct a narrative around what’s happening to me—a deep betrayal for a writer.
And then there were the wigs: exercises in risk-taking, rejections of my boring and shame-consumed past self.
After you have a preemie, but before you get to take your baby home, the world keeps going without you. It’s shocking, honestly, how much the world keeps going.
Being an “interesting” patient who also happened to be a trainee made me a morbid little celebrity.
Dr. Couney settled in the United States in 1903, when he began exhibiting incubator babies on Coney Island every summer. “Infant Incubators With Living Babies,” the sign above the building read.
In France, universal (or socialized) health care is half-NASA, half-MacGyver. And it works. I have to suspect the main objection to adopting the best healthcare system on the planet is just that it’s French.
Being disabled means hundreds of thousands of people believe they always know better than you do.
“In the emergency room, my instincts exploded from protective to full-blown primal. And it felt like love.”
