Pinned
Jennifer Brea🦒
53.4K posts
Jennifer Brea🦒
@jenbrea
Filmmaker @4mmfilm @unrestfilm @longroadhomedoc. @MEActNet co-founder. Dropped out Harvard Poli Sci/Stats Ph.D after virus. #MECFS, #longCOVID
- Until I saw it, I didn’t know how much I needed this photo of Selma Blair at the Vanity Fair Oscar party last night: beauty, pain, glamor, real life—all in a single portrait.
- I am just going to keep saying it. This is the largest mass disabling event in our history. The more I sit with that reality the more dissonant our entire approach to the pandemic appears. It would be great if MDs could start talking about this.
- Please stop telling young people they should avoid #COVIDー19 infection to protect the old. Tell them to protect themselves. Long-term symptoms 6+ mo post-infection: EBV: 11% Q fever: 11% Ross River Virus: 11% West Nile Virus: 31% SARS: 87% Ebola: 90% COVID-19: We have no idea
- You know, it’s taken me awhile to come to this realization, but dropping out of graduate school, losing your career, not having your intended children, and being bedridden for seven years because your neurologists fucked up is…kind of a big fucking deal.
- This is wild. A data scientist, after tweeting about my husband @owasow’s work, was accused of anti-blackness and fired from his job. Not for nothing, but Omar majored in Race & Ethnic Relations, co-founded BlackPlanet, got a Ph.D in African-American studies, and is black.
- It’s worth noting/remembering that part of why polio was taken so seriously had nothing to do with death (extremely rare) but rather, long-term disability. Why is #longCOVID any different?
- Just a quick—and possibly my only—note to say thank you to everyone who supported me and Omar when I went “missing.” I was having a severe hypothyroid crisis (TSH > 100) causing rhabdomylosis and likely affecting every system thyroid hormone affects, which is...every system.
- Does anyone else just not tell their doctor a lot of their symptoms because a) you have too many b) he won’t know what to make of them or c) he won’t believe them anyway?
- All this talk of telemedicine, telecommuting, telelearning. It's as though ABLE-BODIED PEOPLE LOVE ACCESSIBILITY! Remember how wonderful it is to have options when you can't leave your home. Become allies to make some of these changes permanent.
- If you are a doctor and you are angrier about alternative medicine than you are about the millions of people who seek alternatives because the mainstream system does not research, cannot effectively treat, or worse, routinely gaslights these patients, then you have work to do.
- When @edyong209 interviewed me for this piece, he asked (I paraphrase) “What do journalists get wrong when writing about your community?” I’ve done 100+ interviews. I can’t recall ever being asked that question. You should *always* ask that question.
- When you see a tsunami coming, the best thing to do is to wait until it crashes the beach so you can measure how high the wave is and issue the appropriate evacuation order. Until then, how can you know who is actually at risk? It’s not like we have had tsunamis before.
- For eight years, I have mostly bedbound, homebound or a wheelchair user. It has been a sometimes wonderful, but often unbelievably difficult journey. I wanted to share that thanks to three neurosurgeries, all of my ME symptoms are now in remission: medium.com/@jenbrea/healt…
