The Review 

Humans love to believe that it’s going to get better. Her lungs had been the first thing to go. She couldn’t venture up a flight of stairs without a five-minute break to catch her breath. Still, she’d said she was fine. When her coughing fits overtook her sentences and her best friend begged her to go to the doctor, she insisted it was just a bad cold. Next was her stomach. There wasn’t a food she could keep down, so she stopped eating. Everyone said she needed to keep her st

By Sarah Birdsong Mere weeks after Hurricane Irma raged her way through Atlanta in the month of September, 2017, I sat on the patient bed of my local gastroenterologist. The white paper crinkled beneath my weight as I shifted uncomfortably, the whole of my abdomen strained. Initially, I believed I’d come down with the flu. I can’t say for sure exactly how it happened. One morning as I prepared for work, I simply felt “off.” I took my Vitamin C, I upped my Zinc dosage, and I w

By Rob Cook Each brick of the hospital attacks each brick next to it. The fighting itself casts a shade that lengthens over the parking lot, the incurable, pampered vehicles. The sky, a vast blockage, stays cemented to each curtain-lidded room— (A flock of side effects keeps it there, prohibits the slightest blade of wind.) The doctor gazes down at his many empty patients, an accumulation of bricks and disordered questions: “Will I get my stomach back if it still doesn’t work

By Anna Allen All hospitals smell the same: alcohol wipes, sugar-free cherry Jell-O, and cheap, plasticky bars of soap. The smell gets caught in my hair every time. This time, instead of dousing my strands in pomegranate shampoo, I ask Anne to shave my head bald. Anne runs her hands through my reeking hair one last time, says she doesn’t smell anything at all, tears threatening to swan dive from her waterline. When she picks up the razor, I feel no loss. I look like I’m in mo

Image text: Chronically Lit’s Link Roundup: the best illness writing online I have #multiplesclerosis . I am in an exacerbation. By the grace of the lord, and will power and the understanding producers at Netflix , I have a job. A wonderful job. I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things. My memory is foggy. And my left side is asking for directions from a broken gps. But we are doing it . And I laugh and I don’t know exactly what I will do precisely but I will do my best

By MacKenzie Dexter When I was fourteen, my spine was pinned with twenty-two screws and pinched with two ten-inch rods to correct my scoliosis that had curved my body at a sixty-four degree angle. I was a teenager, anxiously awaiting for womanhood to arrive wrapped in a pink bow sprinkled with Midol.  I was excited about this pivotal moment in my life that finally gave me a reason to wear a bra. And then, the surgery happened. My mother tied a stiff blue hospital gown around

By Cade Leebron Call me Curly-Q for the swirled snake IV line spiraling out of my upper arm. Nothing perfect ever ends, or that’s a lie I’m okay hanging out with. It’s late here in Middletown, it’s unspecific. His hands tap fake drum beats to get the drip rate just right, love tastes like prednisone. In the hospital a trainee makes me waterfall all over the room. Gore is a biohazard, and he misses the best parts. I tell it to him after, like: you should have seen her fa

by Noah Kirby Water would be nice, you think. But the nurse wasn’t asking you, she was asking your father. He lies there dying of cancer, but all you can think of is how thirsty you are; how nice it would be to drink anything, especially water. Your dad croaks no, and the nurse leaves. He doesn’t have much strength, and so your family doesn’t speak much. You’re all worried that the simple act of hearing may be too hard for him. Him, your father, the farmer. Him, weak? Your fa