COVID-19 is possibly the world’s biggest mass-disabling event. This ambitious book gives a humanized view of chronic illness while offering a poignant reminder of the millions of people with long COVID. The collection is rich with living history from the stories, essays, and poems of 45 long haulers. Writer Mary Ladd, a one-time Anthony Bourdain collaborator, leads the team behind an accessible paperback, offering tales of persisting symptoms and navigating the healthcare system to poignant reflections on grief, loss, and hope. This anthology is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the long-term effects of COVID-19. * Featuring Andrew David King, Pato Hebert, Nina Storey, Emily Pinkerton, Morgan Stephens, Nikki Stewart, Sonya Huber, Ann E. Wallace, Alexis Misko, and others. * Uses a patient-centric, experiential literary approach that is brave and insightful. * A powerful testament to human resilience, strength, and solidarity. “Being part of the first-ever Long COVID Reader is significant because the pandemic was a first for the world, and our stories matter. This book is meaningful as it enables the forgotten Long COVID community to break their silence and contributes to the next phase of my healing journey." —Dr. Sabrina McQueen Johnson, wife, mother, and retired school principal. "Surviving COVID was a gift of new life. As a long hauler, I am reminded of that every day. The Long COVID Reader will be a gift that keeps on giving to others." —Steven Lewis, author, poet, a former mentor at Empire State College, and current Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute faculty. "I want to share my story so no other woman is made to believe her symptoms are all in her head. May our narratives provide solidarity for patients, information for caregivers and providers, and increased awareness and urgency for action from the masses." —Haley Nelson, age 19. She was athletic, academic, and animated before Long-COVID, ME/CFS, POTS, and small fiber neuropathy uprooted her life. Fans of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, The Long Haul, and The Long COVID Survival Guide will love this book. This book is a must-read for * Anyone experiencing long COVID symptoms * Caregivers, family, friends, and anyone looking to understand long COVID * Medical professionals and researchers

The Wig Diaries is Mary Ladd's debut disrespectful cancer book. Delivered with bold gallows humor, it intimately address the gravity of cancer and invites the reader to bear witness to both the horror and the joke(s). Armed with creative sensibility, Ladd robs her diagnosis of its dour weightiness. Refusing to tiptoe around the gnarlier elements of treatment and recovery, the narrative is powerful in its unvarnished honesty and contagious lust for life exemplified by hilarious anecdotes. A uniquely fresh modern and black comedy take on cancer Covers and pokes fun at everything from diagnosis to treatment to medical bills Illustrated by San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Don Asmussen, who has cancer for the second time "I love this book."--Mary Roach, author of the books Grunt, Stiff, Spook, and Bonk "This looks like a hoot and a half. I want more."--Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), author of A Series of Unfortunate Events "Clear-eyed, fun, and reassuring, it's the perfect guide!"--Vanessa Hua, author of A River of Stars and Deceit and Other Possibilities Fans of F*ck Cancer, Cancer is Funny and Healing Through Humor will love this book This book is perfect for Anyone diagnosed with cancer or going through cancer treatment Well-meaning friends and family of anyone diagnosed with cancer Medical professionals who deal with cancer patients Mary Ladd's writing has appeared in Playboy, Time Magazine/Extra Crispy, Health, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in five anthologies, including Lit Starts: Writing Humor from Abrams and the best-selling 642 Things series. You may have seen her onstage at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Breast Cancer Action, Bay Area Young Survivors (BAYS) and reading her first place essay for a Litquake contest. She is a Writers Grotto member who collaborated with Anthony Bourdain on his Bay Area episodes of No Reservations. Don Asmussen is the creator of Bad Reporter, a twice-weekly political comic strip in the San Francisco Chronicle that is syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and the author of Dog vs. Cat: A Nation Divided and The San Francisco Comic Strip Book of Big-Ass Mocha.

Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn’t the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis. In The Long Year, some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India. The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council.

Award-winning professor and author Phyllis Weliver was in the first wave to fall ill with long COVID. Moving from the city to a woodland cottage above a Michigan lake in order to regain health, Weliver reflects on the process of integrating mind/body health with the natural world. As she recovers from long-haul COVID, the author draws inspiration from forest bathing, traditional Odawa and Ojibwe culture, ancient Chinese philosophy, and British and American literature. While this memoir may be of special interest to those dealing with chronic illness, Weliver's narrative ultimately addresses how we might all mend from the bruising pace of modern life. CONTENTS: Preface, Introduction, (1) Water Lingers, (2) The Arrow Tree, (3) Sleeping Bear, (4) Mother Earth, (5) The Golden Ship, (6) Coyote, (7) The Ha-Ha, (8) Two Cranes, (9) Dry Cabin, (10) Chipmunk, (11) Bald Eagle, (12) Crow and Deer, (13) Black Ice, (14) Squirrel and Cedar, (15) Snowstorm, (16) Making Tracks, Appendix A: Our Long COVID; Appendix B: Michigan Tribal Culture

Understand, manage, and treat Long Covid. Reports suggest that over 100m people around the world are living with Long Covid (more than 1.5m in the UK) yet reliable, clear information and guidance remains scarce. This book is the definitive guide to understanding, managing and treating the condition. Written by the world's leading immunologist Professor Danny Altmann and expert patient Gez Medinger, The Long Covid Handbook translates cutting-edge science, patient-led research and practical guidance with clarity. This book will equip you with expert information and advice on: - Long Covid's 200 symptoms, which include fatigue, brain fog, breathlessness and more - Tips for recovery - Which treatments are most effective and why - Who is most susceptible to the condition and why - What we can learn about Long Covid from other chronic illnesses - The impact on mental health This is the essential guide for anyone living with the condition, as well as clinicians seeking to better understand this little-understood illness.

Unravelling Long COVID An authoritative medical reference on the various ways in which Long-COVID presents and an in-depth discussion of its mechanisms and potential therapeutic options. Unravelling Long COVID aims to provide a better awareness and understanding of the persistent health problems that can arise following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Variously described as Long-COVID, Long-Haulers’ Syndrome, and Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, this newly-designated disorder is estimated to have affected somewhere between 50 to 250 million people. It is in fact considered by many as the next global public health disaster. With such a broad and important topic, the authors of Unravelling Long COVID have focused primarily on two major problems in the current understanding of Long-COVID: 1.) the failure to distinguish patients with organ damage—here called Long-COVID Disease – and those with unexplained, persistent symptoms—what is termed Long-COVID syndrome, and 2.) the failure of current medical approaches to comprehend and treat those persistent unexplained symptoms. Unravelling Long COVID is: One of the first books focused specifically on defining and understanding Long-COVID with the goal of establishing optimal management A unique reference to distinguish patients with organ damage caused by Long-COVID disease from those with unexplained, persistent symptoms that manifest as Long-COVID syndrome An in-depth exploration of neuroimmune pathways to help clarify the previously unexplained symptoms of Long-COVID Unravelling Long COVID isan essential reference for anyone interested in Long-COVID and the impact that this condition has had on the population. It will be a useful resource for both patients suffering from the Long-Covid syndrome, their physicians and for the growing number of Long-COVID clinics that have been established across the US, the UK, and other countries. This book is paired with a long-COVID blog, updated regularly by the authors, so the reader will be kept up to date with new clinical and research findings, in real time. To visit this site, follow this link: unravellinglongcovid.com – providing the latest information on long-COVID

The 35th annual edition of Uncle John’s compendium features entertaining, informative, and amusing real-life stories from around the world. This 35th anniversary edition of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader is bursting with everything you could possibly want to read in the throne room, including short articles for a quick trip and lengthier page-turners for an extended visit. Uncle John and his team at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute have once again gathered the most entertaining and amusing stories from the realms of pop culture, history, science, and sports (not to mention accounts of even more dumb crooks!) for your reading pleasure. In addition, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud lists, amusing quotes, and odd factoids that will delight the most ardent of trivia fans.

Silver Award Winner in “Rising To The Moment Focused Topic: COVID Pandemic” Category of the Nautilus Awards As the global Covid-19 pandemic leaves millions with long-term disabling conditions, the survivors fight for recognition and research, which could ultimately help transform care for many overlooked diseases. To the world’s public health authorities, Covid-19 would either be a deadly disease for some, or it would be a simple respiratory illness for most—cleared up in a couple of weeks. But then tens of millions around the world got sick and stayed sick. With scientists and doctors caught off guard, these patients often found solace only in themselves, organizing support groups across continents while ill in bed. An innovative band of patients researched the disease themselves, flipping the script and illustrating a new paradigm for research. In these unprecedented times, the CDC and the WHO came to them. Covid “long haulers” found their new illness wasn’t so new. It resembled a number of post-viral syndromes, hard to treat and neglected by science for decades. CNN journalist Ryan Prior weaves in his own life, the stories of activist patients, and the latest science into a captivating tale of regular people crying out for care that actually works. The stakes are high: As Covid continues to circulate, its long-term effects could grow as well, weighing on the health system for decades to come. But getting Long Covid treatments right could help revolutionize care for all complex, chronic illness. “Ryan Prior brings out the heart of the story simply because he puts his whole self into telling it empathetically and with utmost compassion. Matched with his passion for curiosity, it makes for a story not only worth telling, but worth reading with insatiable interest.” —Stephanie Land, New York Times bestselling author of Maid, one of President Obama’s top picks of 2019 and now a Netflix original series “Ryan Prior’s years of both living with and reporting on chronic disease for major publications makes him ideally suited to write a book about Long Covid. Because he has led the field by helping author principles guiding other science writers in covering contested diseases, he can cover this topic with all the scientific nuance, literary poise, and human empathy it requires. His book could be an example in future decades of how to cover the new epidemics we will undoubtedly see.” —Pam Weintraub, author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic “As a CNN features writer, Ryan has shown a keen nose for compelling human stories and the reporting chops to deliver.” —Brian Vastag, former science reporter for The Washington Post “Ryan Prior’s passion, to both get the story right and bring it alive using amazing storytelling skills, makes his work incredibly important and engaging. His experience living with chronic illness, and his years of writing about it, will all combine to make his book on Long Covid an essential read.” —Tracie White, author of The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist’s Quest to Cure the Illness that Stole His Son

Most of the world is happily witnessing a decline in the burden of COVID-19 disease after the global efforts to develop, produce, and deploy anti-SARS-CoV2 vaccines to massive country-level vaccination campaigns. At the same time, this decline is coming at the cost of a silent public crisis due to the rise in the number of people suffering from the post-COVID-19 syndrome (commonly known as long COVID). These people experience a wide set of symptoms, such as persistent fatigue, post-exertional malaise after minimal physical or mental effort, and unrefreshing sleep, representing a substantial healthcare burden worldwide. Some of these people also comply with the current criteria for the diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a complex disease often stigmatized by society and neglected by research funders over the years.

Tens of millions of people around the world suffer from long COVID, millions more struggle with the aftermath of other viruses, and conventional medicine has no cure for any of them. But doctors at fasting clinics in Europe and the United States have recently reported in peer-reviewed journals that when their patients with long COVID fasted for several days, their fatigue, brain fog, muscle pains, headaches, and other symptoms reversed. In many cases, the long COVID seems to have been entirely eliminated. In this urgent, in-depth essay, Steve Hendricks, one of the world’s foremost journalists of fasting, examines these promising cases of recovery and explores the science of how fasting might reverse long COVID and other post-viral syndromes. For Hendricks, the question was not merely academic. As he describes in stark detail, after falling ill with a virus himself, he became bedridden with a post-viral syndrome that relented only when he fasted. A Cure for Long COVID? is a ray of hope for sufferers of viral fallout, who until now have had little cause for optimism. It’s also a plea to the doctors, scientists, and journalists who for too long have ignored the research that shows fasting can sometimes heal diseases that orthodox medicine is powerless to reverse.