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Nov 4 • 15 tweets • 7 min read
At an event I did last night, someone asked me to recommend poems of illness, and my mind totally blanked. But of course names popped in my head all day today. A little 🧵 of illness poems I love:
(thinking of #Lyme #MECFS, #longcovid #dysautonomia, #autoimmunedisease, and more)
An incredible poem about headaches by Emily Dickinson that I bet some #longcovid and #migraine sufferers could connect to. I mean, these lines:

"And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -"

poetryfoundation.org/poems/45706/i-…
The one that says it *all* about community and connection - John Donne from DEVOTIONS ON EMERGENT OCCASIONS:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main....

any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
You can find the Donne here: web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poet…
A brilliant Jenny Xie poem that touches on depression: poets.org/poem/ongoing
From the Xie:
"....A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an
appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. "
Hieu Minh Nguyen, "Type II": (These lines!! I die.) poets.org/poem/type-ii Image
Thom Gunn, "The Man with Night Sweats" (about HIV/AIDS)--that last image so touching:
poets.org/poem/man-night… Image
Love the defiance and eroticism in this one by Essex Hemphill! Also about HIV/AIDS: poetryfoundation.org/poems/53015/am… Image
Another devastatingly embodied/erotic poem - Mastectomy by Wanda Coleman, in which the pain is offset the lush sensuality, opening like this: poets.org/poem/mastectomy Image
A poem that wounds me every time I read it ("It did help to be wound in jewels....": "Christmas Tree" by James Merrill, about dying of AIDS, told by analogy of a Xmas tree speaking of its demise: poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine…
Those last lines: "Still to be so poised, so /receptive. Still to recall, to praise." [The desired end, I suppose!]
I think this George Herbert poem is about depression, but I read it a LOT when I was really sick, treasuring the way he puts it freezing over - this stanza really captured how I felt when sickest:
poetryfoundation.org/poems/50700/th… Image
These incredible poems by @danez have sustained me - if you like, seek out more of their poetry: onbeing.org/poetry/a-note-… Image
I'll add more - there are so many good contemporary ones! And I'd love to hear yours.

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More from @meghanor

Meghan O'Rourke Profile picture
Nov 7
Just read the @NYMag piece about #longcovid and I've got a lot of critiques of it - as a journalist, as an editor, &, of course, as a person living with complex chronic illness. Briefly, here are some of the issues I see, ones I think turn up in a lot of magazine pieces:🧵
First, the piece conflates patients with #longCOVID and #POTS who might be helped by exercise rehab (done right--itself hard to find) with those who will be harmed by exercise. There are different groups. Important to make fine distinctions as a science writer.
I am a patient with #longcovid and #pots who has benefitted from exercise, but for the first months of #longcovid my dysautonomia was so bad that exercise led to days-long crashes. This is not complicated to grasp/understand/message--backed up by research; see @PutrinoLab etc.
Read 16 tweets
Meghan O'Rourke Profile picture
Sep 12
So, it's becoming increasingly clear to me (11 weeks out from infection) that I may have some form of #longCOVID, and I've decided to be public about it now.

One of my main symptoms is the form of brain fog that @edyong vividly describes in his must-read piece. How so? 🧵
Mostly it's a day-to-day executive function challenges; interestingly, *quite unlike* the "brain fog" I had before, when I appear to have had untreated Lyme disease or Bartonella. (Based on a CDC positive test for the latter).

That manifested as a flu-like fogginess.

But... /2
What I've experienced since COVID is distinct--more like "the mental wall" @ahandvanish and @edyong and @PutrinoLab describe here.

Yesterday, for example, I found it hard to figure out where "11 am" was on my Google calendar dropdown menu. I thought I'd find it near 12 am./3
Read 8 tweets
Meghan O'Rourke Profile picture
Aug 11
It gets to me when public organizations frame flawed and convenient group-think as unimpeachable logic. The genuinely pragmatic, intellectual position on COVID right now is not being represented by the CDC guidelines or /1
by these quotes in @nytimes:

“We know that Covid-19 is here to stay,”

"This is a welcome change...it actually shows how far we’ve come.”

Well, yes, let's look at how far we have come in the pandemic... /2
-More than 1 million people dead, plenty of whom did not have to die. As @edyong notes here, US had largest life expectancy decline in 2020 compared to peers: theatlantic.com/health/archive…
and
medrxiv.org/content/medrxi…

/3
Read 7 tweets
Meghan O'Rourke Profile picture
Jul 1
Having COVID as someone who spent a decade + sick with an infection and then infection-associated illness, I have a few totally impressionistic thoughts about my virus experience... (mini 🧵)
So you have some sense of my health history: I have POTS, EDS, suspected MCAS, small fiber neuropathy, autoimmune thyroiditis, and post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome/some kind of tick-borne illness. I was really sick from 2011-14, after which I got *much* better. /2
This is a tricky virus. I am highly used to self-monitoring and managing my health and am alert to most signs of trouble. Today, I thought I was doing well, & I took the stairs to pick up a grocery delivery to spare infecting anyone thru my mask. Elevators in Paris = tiny. /3
Read 9 tweets
Meghan O'Rourke Profile picture
Apr 19
Let's be really clear about what is happening at this stage in the pandemic: We are giving up on public health and embracing the privatization of health in ways that serve the able and young & write off anyone vulnerable. 1/
I recommend listening to @gregggonsalves on @BrianLehrer today for his edifying reminder that the now normative view that each of us should assess "personal risk" is in fact a very radical version of "public health": wnyc.org/story/pandemic… 2/
Instead of having a rational discussion of layered strategies like masking, we are in a maddening cycle of suggesting that strategies to prevent COVID *means* harming kids or failing to get colonoscopies.
/3
Read 8 tweets
Meghan O'Rourke Profile picture
Mar 20
The blanket assertions about #longCOVID in the recent @Nytimes newsletter quoted below are dangerously reductive. We are at a place in #longCOVID and pandemic discourse where a lot in the media minimize the reality of long COVID. Why is that? /1
It's partly because of most journalists' lack of experience with/understanding of the state of the science of infection-associated illnesses such as #MECFS and more. I just spent 10 years reporting on them and I still am overwhelmed. But... /2
I think it's also because those who haven't grappled with the real vulnerability of our bodies simply find it too scary to contend with the (seeming) randomness of #longCOVID. You can't rationalize a way to be safe from it. /3
Read 11 tweets

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