Field Notes: "My Body is a Clock"
Plus, a new blood test to detect pre-eclampsia, a 2028 mock obit of the Match, "the motherhood fallacy of self-sacrifice," and 2 more items of note
Hello, dear friends! It’s blazing summer here, so our schedules are all out of sync. We are sleeping in later, staying up later playing Wordle and Quordle and Spelling Bee, the daily games my son is into this season. It’s reminding me how much simply going to bed at the same time and rising at the same time (which, admittedly, I’m not stellar at even during the school year) affects a human body. Bedtimes! They are a thing for a reason! 🙃
Onto this week’s Field Notes, 6 interesting things related to illness and wellness I’ve run across lately:
1} My Body Is a Clock’: The Private Life of Chronic Care (New York Times gift link) — In this photo essay, Sara J. Winston, an artist and the photography program coordinator at Bard College, shares self-portraits of her monthly infusions and her insights as a person with a chronic illness, multiple sclerosis. Every 28 days she receives a medication, intravenously, that prevents immune cells from accessing her brain and spinal cord. Thanks to the medication, she has been in remission for years, but she’s acutely aware of how precarious her access is, and how many people in America are prevented from their own life-improving treatments by cost, insurance, distance, and our wildly unequal healthcare system. Her self-portraits are accompanied by short text, well worth a read. Here is an excerpt: “Though I don’t like to admit it, every choice I make is determined by my need to maintain uninterrupted access to medical care. This has made my illness the truest navigational force of my life. Rather than orient myself to the cycle of the moon, I orient myself to the cycle of infusion. And it has become a system in my creative work. My body is a clock.”
2} A Blood Test Predicts Pre-eclampsia in Pregnant Women (New York Times, gift link) — The FDA has approved a blood test to screen for pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening condition with vague symptoms that affects 1 in 25 pregnant women and that has no treatment except for delivering the baby early. This test, which has been available in Europe for years, reportedly can identify with 96 % accuracy which pregnant women will go on to develop pre-eclampsia in the next 2 weeks. Pre-eclampsia disproportionately affects Black women in America, and may have been a factor in the recent death of U.S. Olympian track star Tori Bowie. “A woman can go from feeling fine and being completely healthy and having normal kidney and liver function, and within 24 to 48 hours those organs can fail and she develops brain swelling and seizures,” Dr. Ravi Thadhani told The New York Times. “That is the scary part of the disease.” The blood test works by tracking the ratio of two proteins made by the placenta; a wider ratio has been linked to a higher risk of severe pre-eclampsia. I was so glad to see this test approved, and I hope it helps many, many women in the years to come.
3} AirNow (website, app) — I check air quality daily now, as the Canadian wildfires continue to blow our way, and considered buying a monitor to track levels both inside and outside. Wirecutter did a round of device testing, and I was surprised that their recommendations spotlighted an app: “Home air quality monitors are limited in their abilities—as well as their reliability—so if you’re concerned about the air quality inside your home, the first thing we suggest you do is measure what’s in the air outside, because outdoor conditions often determine indoor conditions. There’s no simpler way to do that than to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow mobile app, available free on iOS and Android.” Air Now collects information across agencies all over the nation from U.S. agencies like EPA, CDC, NASA, as well as from U.S. Embassies overseas. It also includes smoke and fire data from NOAA and the U.S. Forest Service. I’ve been impressed with it so far. Here’s what it looks like on the website, and the phone interface is similar.
4} A Eulogy for the Match (Journal of Graduate Medical Education) by Dr. Eric J. Warm, Dr. Danielle Weber, and Dr. Benjamin Kinnear — A mock obit of the Match, dated to the year 2028 traces its ailing history. The Match is a U.S. system that “matches” medical school graduates with residency sites, after both sides rank their picks. Residency is training on the job, caring for patients under the supervision of an attending physician, and usually comes with low pay and long hours. Residency training is required to be a practicing physician in every state in America. On a single day in March — Match Day — more than 40,000 medical school graduates learn where they will head for residency, but thousands don’t “match” every year. As you might imagine, the limitations of this arrangement have drawn complaints. The obit ends: “The Match, like paper charts, celluloid x-ray film, and analog stethoscopes, will be fondly remembered for being important and effective in its time. It is survived by chaos and remorse.”
6} The Motherhood Fallacy of Self-Sacrifice — Melinda Wenner Moyer, an investigative science journalist and former Slate parenting columnist, writes a Substack newsletter that “digs into the science behind popular parenting advice and customs.” This recent post starts with the challenges and guilt of summer scheduling (school is out, parents are working, moms are usually the ones figuring out what to do with the kids) but its essence is all-season, as Melinda coins “the motherhood fallacy of self-sacrifice — the pernicious but pervasive idea 1) that we are only good mothers if we are constantly focused on our kids, and 2) that the moment we prioritize ourselves, we are directly harming our children. It’s a fallacy because this isn’t actually how it works. What’s good for us isn’t, by default, bad for our kids. It’s far more common for the opposite to be true: What’s best for us is often best for our kids.” Amen. This principle is true in general, I think: Taking care of ourselves physically, mentally, socially — all the ways that make us healthy and happy — is best for everyone else, too.
I hope you all have a lovely rest of the week and do the things that are good for you — and, by extension, good for those who love you, too.
To our journeys,
Brianne