knowledge at your tips
Priya, a 41-year-old marketing director in Austin, was laid off on a Tuesday morning. By Friday she had two letters waiting: a COBRA election notice quoting $1,840 per month for her family of four, and a reminder that her 60-day Marketplace special enrollment window had started ticking. She had been seeing a psychiatrist for treatment-resistant … Read more
Tomas, a 28-year-old software engineer from Seattle managing bipolar II disorder, planned a six-week solo backpacking trip across Southeast Asia. He was stable on lamotrigine and quetiapine, had been symptom-free for nearly two years, and his psychiatrist cleared him for travel with a three-month medication supply. Halfway through the trip, in a hostel in Chiang … Read more
Jasmine was 26, twenty-four weeks pregnant, and trying to do the right thing. She had been using heroin for three years before learning she was pregnant, and after her first prenatal visit at a clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, she decided she was going to quit. Cold turkey. By herself. Forty hours into withdrawal she was … Read more
Rachel, a 39-year-old self-employed photographer in Asheville, had spent three years cycling through Marketplace plans with rotating networks. Each January she watched her primary care doctor leave the network, her therapist drop out, and her formulary change to substitute generics. By the third year, frustrated and exhausted, she dropped her Marketplace coverage and signed up … Read more
Marjorie, an 84-year-old retired librarian in Madison, Wisconsin, had lived independently in the same house for forty-three years. Then over the course of three weeks, her daughter Beth noticed something was very wrong. Marjorie called her at 4 a.m. convinced intruders were in the attic. She accused her grandson of stealing checks she had actually … Read more
Devon Pritchett, a 41-year-old IT director in Raleigh, paid a coach $2,800 over four months to help him handle what he described as workplace burnout and intermittent panic at his desk. The sessions felt productive at first, full of breathing exercises and weekly accountability check-ins around exercise and sleep. By the third month his panic … Read more
Marcus, a 31-year-old former Army infantry sergeant, walked into a generic sober living house in Tampa, Florida, after 28 days of inpatient rehab and lasted four days. The house was clean, the rules were reasonable, the manager was kind, but Marcus could not sleep. The house had eight men in it, none of whom had … Read more
Tyler was 17, a senior linebacker for his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania high school football team, and had taken thousands of hits over four years before the one that ended his season. The hit itself looked routine on film — helmet-to-helmet contact during a tackle in the second quarter against a rival school. He stood up wobbly, … Read more
Marisol Tavares, a 34-year-old graphic designer in Albuquerque, had spent eleven months on a waitlist to see a psychiatrist for her treatment-resistant depression. Her primary care doctor had cycled her through three SSRIs, none of which produced lasting improvement, and the next available board-certified psychiatrist within fifty miles had openings in late October. A friend … Read more
Trevor, a 34-year-old software engineer in Sacramento, had been on bupropion for treatment-resistant depression for nine months when he was found unresponsive at his desk by a coworker who initially thought he was sleeping. The convulsions started while paramedics were loading him into the ambulance and continued through the emergency department triage area, prompting immediate … Read more