Diane, a 52-year-old elementary school teacher in Kansas City, had smoked a pack and a half a day for thirty-four years. When her doctor delivered the abnormal chest CT result, she walked out of the office, drove straight to a drugstore, and bought nicotine patches and gum. By the third day cold turkey, she could … Read more
Marcus Reyna did three combat tours in Helmand Province before the Marine Corps medically retired him in 2019. The PTSD diagnosis came first, the alcohol came second, and by the time he was thirty-two he had been evicted from two apartments in San Antonio and was sleeping in his pickup outside a Whataburger. A VA … Read more
Priya, a 27-year-old paralegal in Minneapolis, did not think she had a problem until the night she found herself crying in her bathroom at 1:30 a.m. after three hours of doomscrolling. The trigger had been small: a coworker’s vacation post. The spiral had been long: comparison, news, more comparison, a strange wellness influencer’s diet routine, … Read more
Priya, a 28-year-old paralegal in San Diego, had just bombed an oral argument practice when her hands began to claw inward involuntarily. Her lips went numb. Her jaw tightened. By the time her supervisor walked her to the urgent care two blocks away, she was convinced she was having a stroke. The clinician took one … Read more
Dr. Anita Rao practiced anesthesia at a Level I trauma center in Cleveland for nine years before the diversion started. It began with leftover fentanyl in syringes that should have gone to waste. By month four she was injecting between cases, hiding the evidence in the drug return system. The OR pharmacy noticed the discrepancies … Read more
When 19-year-old Marcus Bell first walked into a therapy office in Austin, Texas, he had already been turned away by two providers. The first told him he needed to “wait until he was older to be sure.” The second insisted on a 12-month exploratory phase before discussing a referral letter for hormone therapy, even though … Read more
Marcus had been driving for Uber and DoorDash in Phoenix for almost three years when the panic attacks started. He was making decent money, around $52,000 a year, but he had no health insurance because he assumed contractors couldn’t afford it. After his third trip to the emergency room in two months, an ER social … Read more
Maya, a 31-year-old graphic designer in Asheville, North Carolina, started noticing the dread before her phone even buzzed. Her best friend Tasha had been calling nightly for months, sometimes for two hours, processing a chaotic breakup, a job she hated, and a complicated relationship with her mother. Maya loved her. She wanted to help. But … Read more
Tasha noticed the changes slowly at first. Her mother Evelyn, 78, living alone in Charlotte, had always managed her own affairs, but in the span of about eighteen months she’d missed three Medicare Advantage open enrollment windows, let her supplemental coverage lapse, accumulated $4,200 in unpaid prescription copays, and started telling Tasha that “the people … Read more
When Mei-Lin Chen, a 34-year-old software engineer in Sunnyvale, California, finally decided to seek therapy after months of insomnia and silent crying spells in her car, she expected the hardest part to be admitting she needed help. It turned out the harder part was finding someone who could understand her. The first English-speaking therapist asked … Read more