Great piece this morning by Ed Yong at The Atlantic “Fatigue Can Shatter a Person” summarized here if you don’t have access to the whole thing. One of the points he makes is that “fatigue” is an all-encompassing term that covers a multitude of what are in fact very different symptom sub-types. Your doctors need to understand how different these types of fatigue are, and as Yong points out, there is a good chance they don’t. This is exactly like other... Read more
I write a fair bit about the mental game of living with chronic illness, and maybe that seems off-topic for a religion website. So let’s compare a tweet from an actual doctor who regularly sees patients with autoimmune diseases versus this morning’s Gospel. First our tweet, and this is so typical of the experience of many patients with difficult-to-diagnose illnesses: Just saw a teenager with autoimmune disease and #POTS who was sent to a certain "ability lab" outpatient rehab program,... Read more
My friend Emily DeArdo and I have a fitness club. It meets via text message, and it involves reporting in how we’re doing and how our day went, and congratulating each other for making good decisions where our health is concerned. And here’s the thing: Emily is the girl who has kept me going on exercise, and not giving up, when it was extremely difficult to believe that it mattered. When you have a chronic illness, exercising is really hard.... Read more
I’m out of the closet as a Taylor Swift fan, even though I fully recognize that significant parts of her work and political beliefs are contrary to the Catholic faith. I won’t say I am comfortable holding onto the true, good, and beautiful in a mixed-package that has some serious concerns as well? But also at times Swift expresses Catholic things, and ordinary human emotions and experiences, with spot-on artistry and magnificence. So I work with it. The question I volunteered... Read more
From a conversation this evening: Your daughter who likes to do “boy” things will be much happier as a girl-who-does-boy-stuff than going through life pretending to not be a girl. Don’t let sexist haters keep your daughter from enjoying: fast cars contact sports science math dark colors trains firefighting yard work heavy machinery carpentry electronics dinosaurs martial arts sci-fi sports bars electric guitars short hair comfy shoes chainsaws grilling steaks professions that earn a living wage . . . or... Read more
There reaches a point where you lose your patience with being mocked. With the latest round of businesses using campy men in drag to promote their products, I’ve hit my limit. I’m tired of my femininity being reduced to absurd stereotypes. I’m tired of being insulted and belittled. I’m out of patience for men anywhere on the political or social spectrum who deign to instruct women on what it means to be “feminine.” I know what it means to be feminine... Read more
It doesn’t take much ink to sum up the Catholic view of disordered sexuality: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Matthew 5:27-28 I can’t be certain, but I would hazard that there are very, very few adults who never ever experience disordered sexual attraction. Jesus makes it clear that even if... Read more
Today we’re looking at a particularly abhorrent fallacy I ran across this morning, and no, I’m not going to give any attention to the offender. By the end of this tutorial you should have no difficulty spotting it when you see it in the wild. (If you’ve never been quite sure what “equivocation” means, the Wiktionary definition may help.) The fallacy runs like this: Person A died of a cause described in the medical terminology as XYZ. Person B also... Read more
Way back in the fall of 2020, what caught my eye in reports of “long covid” were accounts from physicians and nurses who previously had been physically active and professionally ambitious, but now no amount of determination and perseverance could shake off their persistent, debilitating fatigue. Recently I was surprised, therefore, when someone I usually look to for level-headed, logical, data-supported analyses was convinced that “long covid” was purely an anxiety-related disorder. Since I follow several (real, credentialed, not-quacky, not... Read more
I have a friend who will be sitting the bar exam on Ash Wednesday. She’s young and healthy, but still: What a high-pressure situation! She needs to be as mentally sharp as possible, and she has to have the stamina to make it though the day’s exam without flagging. A poor performance means, at best, another round of studying and exams; in a worst case it could completely derail her legal career. It is not the kind of day when... Read more
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