It was 2:47 a.m. when Maya, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, finally typed the message into her residence hall group chat: “I don’t think I want to be here anymore.” Her roommate Ainsley, asleep until her phone buzzed, woke up, read the screen twice, and ran across the hallway barefoot. She had heard … Read more
Priya, a twenty-nine-year-old graphic designer in Austin, Texas, had spent three weeks calling therapists in her insurance network. The eight names that had openings were either booked into the following spring, no longer accepting her plan, or specialized in something that did not match her needs. When she finally found a therapist whose Instagram post … Read more
On a Wednesday afternoon in Phoenix, Marisol noticed her hands trembling as she sat in her parked car outside her office. She had run out of her sertraline four days earlier because her psychiatrist’s portal kept rejecting the refill request. Sleep had collapsed. Her boss had pulled her aside that morning to ask if everything … Read more
Bernard, a fifty-two-year-old line cook in Cleveland, walked into the ER on a Tuesday with chest pain that turned out to be a panic attack stacked on top of an ulcer. Three weeks later, an envelope arrived with a $14,800 bill for the visit, the imaging, and the overnight observation. Bernard had no insurance, two … Read more
Marisol, a 38-year-old graphic designer in Albuquerque, started using lavender oil after her sister sent her a starter kit from a multi-level marketing company. Within weeks she was diffusing seven different blends, swallowing oregano capsules for “immune support,” and applying undiluted clove oil to a toothache that turned out to be an abscess. When she … Read more
By the second visit to the emergency room in three weeks, Priya’s husband finally said it out loud at the kitchen table in Austin. He could not keep doing this. Priya had been in weekly therapy for six months, on two psychiatric medications for four months, and she still spent most evenings curled on the … Read more
Desmond, a forty-one-year-old high school history teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, lost the central vision in both eyes to a rare retinal disease over the course of fourteen months. He kept teaching. He kept walking his daughter to the bus. What he could not keep doing was the thing he had done every Sunday for two … Read more
Three weeks into recovery, Reggie was sitting in his sister’s kitchen in Cincinnati when the pharmacy called. His monthly Vivitrol injection was approved, but the local CVS could not stock it. The pharmacist explained that Vivitrol is a specialty medication that ships from a designated specialty pharmacy, refrigerated, with a 48-hour delivery window, and his … Read more
Helen had lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Tucson, Arizona for eleven years after her husband died. Her companion through every one of those years was a small black poodle named Otto. When Otto was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma at thirteen and declined rapidly, Helen stayed up with him for the last seventy-two hours, hand-feeding … Read more
Reggie was nineteen, freshly out of foster care, and one course away from failing out of a community college outside Charlotte when his English instructor introduced him to a retired electrical engineer named Walter from a local Big Brothers Big Sisters affiliate that ran a young-adult program. Walter was sixty-eight, recently widowed, and had told … Read more