Healthcare

Standards of Care

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:45 -0400

The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

Pockets

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Shoplifting cigarettes, running the pool table, creating a “pocket prairie”

Getting Dressed

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans

Airborne

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Studies done with animals in labs don’t totally replicate the way humans get infected, which involves mucus, saliva, and other pathogens. We don’t know the full complexity of that interaction.

A Good House

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing.

The Wisdom Package

haydensaunier@gmail.com — Thu, 30 May 2024 00:03:00 -0400

I ask the youngish eye doctor why my eyes itch / and burn and why new floaty bits / of paramecium-shaped debris swim // through my view each day

Guardians

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

His inability to tell me when he’s sick, the most baseline, possibly the easiest thing to express, means he isn’t expressing a million other needs that are harder to pin down: If his shoes are too tight. If his ear hurts. Once, my son was walking funny. When I looked at his foot, he had a bee stinger sticking out from his toe. Being a parent of a disabled child means I can’t assume anything. I am taking care of his needs, and if I miss a need he can’t express, I’m failing him. I’m always failing him.

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Speak, Memory

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

What I Don’t Tell My Wife

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:05:00 -0400

There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.

Chair/Body/Home

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:05:00 -0400

What would it take for me to no longer want to leave my body? What would it take for me to see my body as my home? I don’t know, really, except perhaps more exposure to different ideas about disability, different ideas about beauty and worth.

Field Guide to Falling Ill

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 04:05:00 -0400

I can’t say what it’s like to suffer from a severe, chronic illness, the kind that knocks your life into a new orbit. But I can tell you what it’s like to be in the postscript of illness, its undead state, where the crisis has passed but recovery isn’t certain. It’s a dull, heavy place.

Invasion Of Privacy

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 04:00:00 -0400

Three of the nine justices have publicly articulated their position that the Constitution does not contain a right to privacy — at least, when it comes to matters involving contraception. . . . And that’s just the three we know about.

Teeth

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:00:00 -0400

Losing them, fixing them, forgetting to put them in

Every Baby Needs To Be Rocked

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 04:10:00 -0400

I want to help carry the burden when it is heaviest. The dying patients and their families need time with a compassionate stranger: someone they don’t have to expend their fragile energy to try to support or protect.

Quarantine Poem #17

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:05:00 -0500

Staying at home with my books and out-of-tune piano / and a cat who loves me only when she’s out of food is nothing new. / I’m OK. Thank you for asking. I have become quite used to sending / thoughts and prayers to those who keep the world going round / while I spin old punk records — Dead Kennedys, Buzzcocks, Crass — / lamenting days long past.

FaceTime

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 05:05:00 -0500

I held an iPad for Miguel as he lay in his hospital bed / so he could see his family sheltered at home. / He was suffocating, this man who at the worst of times / would only tell his loved ones, Me siento bien. / All around us the equipment of life / and death was buzzing, humming, beeping, / a stubborn choir of mockingbirds.

The Other Side Of The Mountain

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0400

This was what it was like to do the work she did, to recognize the person in the dying body and to stay with them — like bearing witness to light moving through wreckage, stubborn and pure.

Mild Case

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 04:05:00 -0400

When did the distance from the bed to here become twenty-six miles? That pair of pants I stepped over, you see that? Goddamn Everest that was.

The Practice Of Touch

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 17:00:00 -0500

I imagine my own daughter in Danny’s situation. She is a toddler, so I would be allowed to stay with her if she got COVID. But if she were older, what would I do? What rules would I break to sit beside her?

Sunbeams

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

June 2020

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Featuring Michael Meade, Pema Chödrön, Peter A. Selwyn, and more.

The Extra Year: Selected Poems

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:05:00 -0400

— from “Almost Done” | My wife has taken Pepper to the vet this morning. She is losing her hair, doesn’t like her food, has growths on her skin, moves slowly after eighty-four dog years.

The Button

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:05:00 -0400

The little button lying in my hand brought the violent history of the place to life. For a moment war wasn’t just pictures in textbooks. I could feel the residue of it, the half-life of violence.

Fear And Love

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400

I wish I could make the argument that a river / and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego / are enough.

The Samples

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Helplessness makes monsters of people. He’s seen chairs thrown, exam tables kicked. The rooms pathologists speak to patients in now have everything bolted down.

The Routine

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:05:00 -0400

I take the test, grade myself strictly, and add up the points. The result is that I’m likely an alcoholic and should seek treatment as soon as possible. I take the test again and grade myself more forgivingly, because forgiveness is a virtue.

Sunbeams

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.

Russell Brand

April 2019

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Featuring John Taylor Gatto, Olga García Echeverría, Katy Butler, and more.

The Cure For Racism Is Cancer

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400

This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy — one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.

In the country of cancer everyone is simultaneously a have and a have-not. In this land no citizens are protected by property, job description, prestige, and pretensions; they are not even protected by their prejudices. Neither money nor education, greed nor ambition, can alter the facts. You are all simply cancer citizens, bargaining for more life.