Closer Look
'Painting is a kind of digestion': Living with your partner's chronic disease — and your own
Photo illustration: Casey Shenery for STAT
For Lauryn Welch, painting was a way to make sense of what her partner, Samuel Geiger, was feeling once diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder called hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Then she learned she had an autoimmune disease. Their intertwined story is told in the film "The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms." STAT's Isabella Cueto asked Welch about their life.
How did you discover painting?
I didn't really start painting seriously on my own until shortly after Sam got sick. Painting is a kind of digestion. With chronic illness, it's often a moving target day to day. So painting has been a way to reclaim that experience.
How do you figure out your own, unspecified autoimmune condition?
I've been working through this in my art, too, realizing that there is a spectrum of how people deal with illness and disability. And we all deal with it at some point to some extent.
Read the full interview.
global health
Early detection and bundled treatment can reduce hemorrhage after childbirth, study finds
Postpartum hemorrhage is the number-one cause of maternal mortality around the world, striking an estimated 14 million women each year and leading to about 70,000 deaths, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. A NEJM study out today reports success with a method that reduced heavy bleeding by 60% when combining a drape to measure bleeding with simultaneous — not sequential — use of four WHO-recommended treatments.
The trial at 80 hospitals in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania split patients having vaginal deliveries into two groups. One group got a calibrated blood-collection drape and if needed, uterine massage, medicines to contract the womb and stop the bleeding, IV fluids, and an examination and escalation to advanced care if necessary. Hemorrhages were detected in 93% of patients in that group compared to 51% in the control group, who got usual care. In another report today, the WHO says progress has stalled on reducing maternal and infant deaths.
health
Adolescents living through adverse experiences early in the pandemic were more vulnerable later
Since the pandemic began, people have been concerned that school closures and lockdown policies might have harmful effects on children who are exposed to serious problems at home. A new survey in Pediatrics of teens found that those who said in the fall of 2020 they'd been through adverse childhood experiences were more likely to say they'd lived through another one when contacted in spring 2021.
The researchers defined these preventable, potentially traumatic events as direct violence or neglect or indirect, as in witnessing violence or substance use in the home, parental incarceration, or mental illness. In the first survey, 64% reported having experienced more than one such event. Six months later, 28% said they'd been through a new one. Those who'd had four or more events were more than twice as likely to say it had happened again. The authors urge prevention and intervention across school, home, and community settings.
Correction: An item in Friday's newsletter misstated how many Americans still smoke cigarettes. It's 11.5% among adults, not all age groups.
No comments