ANNALS OF MEDICINE
In 2014, Erin Storch looked in the mirror and felt as if she were drifting leftward. It was a feeling she didn’t know how to fully describe. She had been on maternity leave, and had recently returned to her job at a hospital consultancy in Washington, D.C. Storch had been promoted while on leave, so she was learning something new at work—and it seemed strangely difficult to absorb the information. She was also pumping milk three times a day. People suggested that what she was experiencing might be profound exhaustion; she disagreed. “I knew in my gut that the way I was feeling was not within the spectrum of what you would consider normal,” she said.
There were further unsettling sensations: “Coffee tasted like water. The left side of my body was weak and numb.” Storch went to see her ob-gyn, who sent her for a CT scan. Nothing unusual showed up.
Storch’s son was six months old when her symptoms manifested. When he was seven and a half months old, she walked down the stairs while holding him, and fell. Her son was O.K. “But then I knew that something was really wrong,” she said. She found a new doctor, who sat with her and her husband “for maybe forty minutes. It was just a conversation—there wasn’t even a physical exam. He said to me that he knew a lot of moms with demanding careers and that this was not that.” She started to cry from the relief of being believed. He scheduled an MRI for that evening. “But since there was some time to kill I decided, being me, to go to work,” she said. She crashed her car into a pole in a garage on M Street.
Denne historien er fra July 24, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra July 24, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
