December Shell Exchange
Includes a Hermit Crab!
Welcome to the December 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 or article I haven’t mentioned that you feel warrants attention, drop the link in the comments, and I’ll add it to the rotation next month.
1. “I Am Cat Lady” by Sandra Beasley from VQR 🦀
“‘Cat Lady’ can be a pejorative, as an archetype of spinsterhood. My marriage makes me ineligible for true ‘Cat Lady’ status. But I like to remind my husband that he is a decade older and, given prevailing statistics around average American lifespan, I’ll probably end up his widow. He should get a life insurance policy, I tell him. He does not appreciate this nudge.”
2. “These Disability Doulas Are Helping People Navigate Life More Comfortably” by Tracey Ann Duncan from HuffPost
“What is often difficult for able-bodied people to understand is that adjusting to life as a newly disabled person isn’t just a matter of finding the right care or the right technology or the perfect life hack. Although those are crucial necessities, becoming disabled is a total identity shift. That intersection between the practical and the existential, I learned, is where disability doulas come in.”
3. “Long COVID patients push to see federal research refocused on treatments” by Sarah Boden from NPR
“Despite long COVID's vast reach, the federal government's investment in researching the disease — to the tune of $1.15 billion to date — has so far failed to bring any new treatments to market. This disappoints and angers the patient community.”
4. “Your Friends Shape Your Microbiome—And So Do Their Friends” by Saima Sidik and Nature Magazine from Scientific American
“Spouses and individuals living in the same house share up to 13.9% of the microbial strains in their guts, but even people who don’t share a roof but habitually spend free time together share 10%, the researchers found. By contrast, people who live in the same village but who don’t tend to spend time together share only 4%. There is also evidence of transmission chains — friends of friends share more strains than would be expected by chance.”
5. “Illustrating an Odyssey—Three Days in a Life with Long Covid” by Maggie Bell from Nine Mile
“I am running through dark woods. The blue black of night has swallowed all the other pigment. The brown of the dirt and the tree trunks is blue black. The green of the leaves and the grass is blue black. Maybe it is raining. My desperate limbs catch on branches, on shrubs and brush. My perception is altered, by the dark, but also by other forces. I trip, faceplanting into an assault of cold mud, and hurriedly pick myself back up. All at once, a dreadful epiphany plucks me from oblivion: I am being hunted.”
6. “There’s an effective treatment for menopause symptoms. Why do so few women use it?” by Theresa Gaffney from STAT
“The catalyst for the decline in hormone treatment for menopause was a 2002 landmark study called the Women’s Health Initiative that suggested the therapy came with an increased risk of heart disease and breast cancer. The study specifically focused on using both estrogen and progestin therapy among older, postmenopausal women, most of whom were not experiencing symptoms like hot flashes anymore. It was discontinued due to increased risk as compared to a placebo.”
7. “The Perimenopause Gold Rush” by Jessica Bennett from The Cut*
“Over the course of 18 months, I saw half a dozen specialists — doctors who sent me to other doctors, who suggested acupuncture, who told me to adjust the temperature in my bedroom, to up my antidepressant, to perhaps test my apartment for mold. But in the end it was Google — and maybe the fact that I was reading Miranda July’s All Fours on my Kindle, giving the targeted ads a hand — that ultimately led me to the answer: I seemed to be in perimenopause, a stage of life I’d never even heard of before it was apparently happening. It was a lot like menopause, but it could come more than a decade earlier and long before you stopped having a period. Which, um, seemed like something maybe somebody should have mentioned.”
*If you use a certain twelve-foot ladder, you can access the full article