Selected feature stories
Cystic fibrosis drug brings joy and complications
The small box full of promises arrived at Jessica Anderson’s home on her 31st birthday. A little bigger than a postcard, it was white with green lettering and navy and fuchsia flourishes. She opened it and pulled out a card with pills arrayed in plastic bubbles, coral ones for the morning, baby-blue for the evening. The culmination of decades of research, a reservoir of hope for thousands, these oblong tablets were supposed to transform her life, a life circumscribed by illness and the specter of early death.
The Children of Alzheimer's:
Will it come for us?
My sister has a fantasy about our old age: She imagines that the seven siblings in our family will be living together again, in a house somewhere. Five will be wandering around in bathrobes, lost to dementia. The other two, their minds intact, will look after the lost ones....
We laugh, but we also get flashes of anxiety when a name is forgotten, an appointment missed, a road map misread. Is it beginning? This is what happens to the children of Alzheimer's....
Searching for the roots of chronic pain
The heart monitor beeped rhythmically as Dr. Kyle Eberlin approached the operating table at Massachusetts General Hospital one morning in April. A 30-year-old Navy veteran lay unconscious, and Eberlin set to work on a frequent mission of his: to ease pain. He slid his scalpel along the man’s ankle. Fractured six years ago, the ankle had never stopped hurting.... Eberlin is part of a pioneering effort to find the origins of one of humanity’s most intractable afflictions: chronic pain.
Living in a box
For millions of Americans, pain confines like a glass box, an invisible constraint. As the nation struggles to cope with a surge in opioid abuse, many pain patients — who often rely on the painkillers authorities are trying to restrict — fear their concerns are being drowned out, and chafe at the skepticism they face, whether in the pharmacy or the parking lot. To help people outside the glass box understand, three agreed to share what it’s like, day after day.
Hardest hit, yet least likely to get care
Until recently, Stephanie Williams-Crosby could shake off a cold in a day or two on the rare occasions she got sick. The 55-year-old mother of five and grandmother of eight was such a dynamo that people called her “Roadrunner.” Today, Roadrunner uses the motorized cart in the supermarket, too exhausted to browse the aisles on her feet. A few ordinary chores can flatten her. Williams-Crosby, who is Black, may be part of a silent epidemic of “long COVID” among people of color...
Inside the coronavirus storm
The sidewalks around Boston Medical Center, usually thronged with patients and families, are eerily still. Only one entrance is open. The impression of quiet could not be more wrong. To enter BMC today is to arrive at the heart of the coronavirus storm. For more than 150 years, the hospital has taken pride in caring for the city’s most vulnerable patients. But now the city’s safety net hospital by necessity has become essentially a COVID-19 hospital.