A week after he turned 52, Tom Scocca fell while trying to catch a train in a New York subway station, his legs simply giving out, he explains in an essay on new York. Soon he was experiencing a series of mysterious symptoms: tingling and numbness in his extremities, swollen hands and feet, stiff fingers, tightness in his chest, shortness of breath. He went to the doctor and got no answers; he consulted a multitude of specialists and the lack of answers continued. One test result after another came back normal (except for his positive blood test for general inflammation), but his symptoms continued to worsen or, in some cases, change: the swelling improved, for example, but his ability to exert himself diminished to the point that he could barely carry a bag of rice home from the market. A nurse discovered that his pulse oximeter reading was low, but no response followed.
He caught COVID after avoiding it for three years, after which new symptoms appeared and existing ones worsened. He spent more time in bed, lost weight precipitously, stopped leaving the house. Finally, after a test revealed that his body’s creatine kinase levels (a marker of muscle breakdown) were off the charts, he went to the hospital. The mystery persisted, though, and while new things were discovered (a hernia, a larger-than-normal liver), none of them seemed to offer a firm diagnosis. After thyroid problems were discovered and a muscle biopsy was performed, Scocca was treated with steroids and released from the hospital, his symptoms slightly easing. But by the time he wrote the essay, he still had no answers beyond some kind of autoimmune disease. “I despise stories where a writer tells you everything about a mystery for thousands of words and then fails to provide the solution,” he writes, but “medicine hasn’t really solved the problem of the body attacking itself.” Read his full story here. (Or read other in-depth recaps.)
