The Radical Act of Listening to Patients

In today’s newsletter, bringing patients in, and then:
•The quest for a better power grid
•When America first dropped acid
•Watching the Challenger explode

Soon after she got sick,Amy Siniscalchi felt as though her limbs were burning. “Then it morphed into, like, electrical buzzing,” she remembers. “At times, it would feel like my blood was gurgling, like seltzer in my veins.” Siniscalchi’s story follows a now familiar arc. In March, 2020, as a healthy forty-four-year-old, she was exposed toCOVID, became ill, and never fully got better. Months later, she was still suffering from an array of strange symptoms: debilitating fatigue, memory problems, trouble walking, the seltzer sensation. She sought help from her primary-care doctor but left the encounter feeling dismissed.

“It wasn’t, like, ‘I’m so sorry for your suffering, I believe you, we just don’t know anything yet,’ ” Siniscalchi recalled. “There were a couple of doctors in the beginning that really just acted like nothing was wrong.” In search of answers, Siniscalchi went online. There, in Facebook groups and Slack channels, she found something more affirming than simple fellowship: thousands of others like her were organizing to make their suffering visible while sick and isolated at home.

P.S. Did you knowthat yawning is one of the first things we learn how to do? Despite its reputation as a signal for sleepiness or boredom, yawning can also tell us when we’re hungry or indicate our capacity for empathy. Most likely, though, “a yawn is a form of communication,”Maria Konnikova writes, “one of the most basic mechanisms we have for making ourselves understood to others without words.”