On medical mysteries
As previously discussed, I’m terrible at anticipating near-future trends. But allow me one cultural prediction at the beginning of this still young year: The mysterious illness memoir will be a defining literary genre of the 2020s.
I’m using “memoir” loosely here; I don’t think they need to be books, or even necessarily straight nonfiction, although they will be grounded in personal experience. They include obvious examples like The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke and less obvious ones like Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. They will define our era not only because more people have mysterious illnesses because of/adjacent to COVID, but because every structure in the dominant culture—including, as O’Rourke explores in her book, the world’s “best” medical systems—is all but explicitly designed to not solve these mysteries, or even help patients cope with them. And so the mysterious illness memoir is always also a cultural critique.
This week I want to share two excellent new additions to the canon. First, “My Unraveling” by Tom Scocca in New York, which starts with a minor fall and ends (or rather, keeps going) with his muscles “actively dissolving into my bloodstream”:
Every day, my legs were harder to move. Climbing in the door of an SUV, I couldn’t lift my rear foot over the threshold until I reached down with my hands and pulled it in. Then the grab-and-lift maneuver became necessary to step into my pants. I had to ask the kids to pull pots and cutting boards out of the bottom kitchen cabinets for me. I gave up bedtime-story duty, crawling into bed each night before anyone else, half-hearing my wife’s voice reading in the next room, feeling myself fading out of my own life. I imagined living in a world and a class where a person could retreat to a sanatorium and shut everything down until the problem was figured out.
The second is “Covid Data Log” by Cat Hicks, about a year-and-half with something that is definitely long COVID but also not typical long COVID, a particularly frustrating kind of wilderness:
At this point I am still trapped in my own hamster wheel, thinking about misdiagnosis as something that people will understand if I can just fix it. A measurement expert who is sick is just annoying. I understand now that there is a problem with my small airways, which has meant that I cannot exhale enough of the gas made from the air I inhale before they close in on themselves. This is hard-fought, hard-won knowledge. It won't help. You can't control things just by knowing about them.
Happily, both writers seem to be doing a bit better now, but they’d probably be the first to tell you that’s not the same as a conclusion. The “end” of these stories is only ever the point at which the author chooses to tell them.
My writing
I wrote a news story this week about the oldest cities yet found in the Amazon, built at least 2,500 years ago:
Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past 2 decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar. The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.