What can love look like when you’re disabled — and how do you write about grief when the crisis is still ongoing? In this episode of Still Here, hosts Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets sit down with poet, author, and disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha to discuss their new poetry collection, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other. Leah shares how the book came to be, what it means to document pandemic grief in a crisis that never ended, and the beauty, pain, and joy of disabled love. Subscribe to Still Here wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review telling us what you think of this episode.
Links mentioned:
- Buy The Way Disabled People Love Each Other wherever you get your books
- See Leah on book tour
- #StaceyTaughtUs Syllabus: Work by Stacey Park Milbern
- Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence
Jump to a specific part of the transcript:
Intro
Melanie Marich: [00:00:00] Welcome to Still Here, a Long COVID news and commentary podcast from The Sick Times.
In this episode, we talk to poet, author, and organizer, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, about their new book, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other.
Miles Griffis: I am Miles Griffis.
Betsy Ladyzhets: And I am Betsy Ladyzhets. We are the co-founders of The Sick Times.
Melanie Marich: And I’m Melanie Marich, the podcast producer for Still Here.
Miles Griffis: Many institutions are ignoring the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and trying to erase the Long COVID crisis. [00:00:30]
Betsy Ladyzhets: But here at The Sick Times, we are bringing you the latest news and commentary that matters to the Long COVID community.
Miles Griffis: Without pandemic, denial, minimizing, or gaslighting.
Melanie Marich: In this episode, we’re sharing a conversation Miles and Betsy had with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha.
They’re a poet, author and organizer in the disability justice space, also known as DJ, and they just came out with a new book. It’s called The Way Disabled People Love Each Other.
It’s a poetry collection [00:01:00] that gets into all the messiness, the beauty, the pain, and the joy of disabled love.
Personally, I think everyone should read it because it’s beautiful, it’s devastating, and the poems are so easy to understand and access, even if you’re not a poetry person, per se. Two of my personal faves are called, “I Want to Kill the Medical Industrial Complex for you,” and “in which my parents, Voldemort and Rasputin both get terminal [00:01:30] cancer.”
In this interview, Leah tells Miles and Betsy how the collection came to be, what it’s like to document pandemic grief in a pandemic that never ended, and just exactly how disabled people love each other. Here’s that conversation.
Interview
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: So my name is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, and I am a mixed-race Sri Lankan and white writer, poet, disability, and transform justice organizer, um, author, co-editor of 11 books of poetry, memoir, disability, and transformative justice [00:02:00] writing, and I live in Lenapehoking, Philadelphia.
Betsy Ladyzhets: So we’re talking about your new poetry collection.
Um, do you wanna maybe tell us a little bit about how it came to be?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: I think the easy way of answering that, is that I was already writing some of the poems in this book after my last poetry collection came out in 2019, Tongue Breaker.
And then I was in Seattle when Seattle became the United States epicenter of COVID, you know, we were [00:02:30] the first recorded infections in the States and a lot of things started happening really quickly. We were on a really early intense lockdown. Um, I had discovered before COVID really hit the states that my estranged father was in the late stages of terminal bone cancer.
So I was sitting with a lot of that disabled and survivorhood experience about like, okay, so what. the end game and what am I gonna do? And then COVID happened and the [00:03:00] uprisings happened, and disability justice continues to happen. And on May 19th, 2020, my friend and comrade in Disability Justice, Stacey Park Milbern, unexpectedly died the morning of her 33rd birthday,
and it wasn’t the first COVID death and she didn’t die of COVID, but in terms of my and a lot of other people’s personal last six years in disability justice communities, she was the first big [00:03:30] death of what would become a lot of deaths of a lot, a lot, a lot of beloved
people in the movement, but also like friends, you know, ’cause they’re not separate.
And then, the poems that are in the book come out of mourning Stacey and that really intense loss and also a lot of the other losses that would come in my life. And also a lot of people’s collective disability, justice, life like Lucia Leandro Gimeno, who is also a friend who died a year later and who the book is also dedicated to, [00:04:00] incredible black, Latinx fat trans disabled organizer, birth work organizer, human being.
Yeah, and it became a meditation on what I guess like, sure, like mass disabled grief is like, but also my very personal disabled griefs and grief processes. But you know, the title of the book is The Way Disabled People Love Each Other.
And it was funny ’cause, um. just started going on tour like two weeks ago somewhere in that haze, [00:04:30] somebody was like, wow, the title of your book is such a sneak attack because people are gonna like, look at it and look at the cover that’s like very like, ooh, two people looking at each other and it’s pink and purple and think, Ooh, it’s gonna be soft.
And I’m like, yeah, it’s not that, it’s not not soft, but it’s actually- it’s definitely not a book that’s about like, oh yeah, we just love each other and everything’s great.
The whole book is about like different iterations of complicated disabled love,
including like through grief and through when grief does not make us treat each other well. A lot of stuff I wrote about, about [00:05:00] how like we love each other and we don’t necessarily like each other or get along or not have conflict or not really fucking struggle to be in the same room or know how to love each other,
So then it’s a piece of work for us to learn how to love each other, um, in real time, through imperfections, through bumps, just when we’re not the only one in the room. So it’s that, just that like, that’s how it came to be, you know, like lockdown and grief and beyond.
Miles Griffis: Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, I mean, I’m curious if [00:05:30] you could sort of explain to our listeners, and tell us a little bit more about your friend Stacey Park Milbern, who you dedicated a lot of this collection to. What do you want listeners to know about Stacey?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: Yeah. Um, Stacey was a badass bitch. Stacey was… What I want people to know is that Stacey was working class, southern mixed-race, Korean and white, queer femme organizer, but also I mean if you look at her [00:06:00] Facebook bio, like one of the things she says is friend and often used the term like movement worker, like not organizer, but she’s like, I’m a worker in movement.
I think she would want people to know she wasn’t perfect. She was a deeply flawed, beautiful, ordinary, disabled person. I think I’ve seen a push in recent years as a DJ has grown for, I mean, this happens in every movement. People do stuff and then people die and people are like, oh, these are these like leaders and they’re so amazing and they are [00:06:30] slash were so amazing.
And also none of us were extraordinary more than any of us are, and none of us were imperfect. Like we were all just these regular ass disabled nobodies creating stuff and we still are, and that was definitely true of Stacey,
She’s an incredible poet. I think something I want people to know is that DJ is not just listicles or like practical advice. Like we’re all, like so many people I know who are foundational to DJ then and now are poets and creative writers.
[00:07:00] I met Stacey as a poet. I met Stacey as an incredible writer. Some of her strengths with it, she came up in disabled Young People’s organizing in North Carolina, which included like heavy involvement from folks in the self-advocacy and developmental and intellectually disabled communities.
So I think that she was a maestra of writing in plain language and plain language inflected work. And she was very much like, if this is gonna be real, we need to write beautifully in a way that everybody can understand, like [00:07:30] whatever, quote unquote reading level we get to in school.
Um, she was audacious and she also really loved to live a sensual, joyful, complicated disabled, Asian queer life, is what I will say. Yeah. more, but you know, that’s what I’ve got.
Betsy Ladyzhets: Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think. You were kind of just talking about some of this, but another question we really wanted to ask you you know, as someone who has been doing this work for a long time and like remembering [00:08:00] Stacey and other folks who you talk about in the book, like what lessons would you want to share with people who are more newly disabled, which is a lot of folks in the Long COVID community
as they step into writing, organizing, sharing their experiences publicly, trying to make things happen, like all of the work that you were just describing,
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: Yeah, no, totally. And like I’ve been disabled for more than half my life now, and I was born autistic even though I didn’t know it.
But I wanna say as somebody who, like, I’ve been newly [00:08:30] disabled too, and I think some things I’ll share is that, one of the ways ableism works is I’ve seen over and over again, and I’ve been this person, people are newly disabled, we’re in the shock and we’re in the shame and we’re in the like, how the fuck am I gonna live?
And there’s also a dynamic that happens where one of the ways that ableism functions is that many, many people who are newly disabled have no idea that there are disabled communities, that there are disabled [00:09:00] movements, that disabled peoples plural have histories, that there’s disabled art and thinking, and family fights and arguments.
So a lot of times we think that like, we’re the first people to ever do it. And then we don’t understand when people get pissed off at us. You know, it’s not necessarily our fault, but it is really something to look out for and
I would say that we are all, whether we just figured it out or became disabled last week or whether we’re still figuring it out, are all in a continued process of continually [00:09:30] unpacking internalized ableism and shame and self-hatred. Like it never stops. It gets better and easier and stronger. Like,
I still struggle with stuff and that doesn’t just affect us on a personal level. It also affects us in how we organize and how we, get a group of people together who are also disabled and try and do a thing, right?
Like, we’re all undoing this shit at the same time. And you know, the $6 million disabled thing that keeps happening is I will be working with comrades where we’ve all been cripped out or crazy or neurodivergent for a while [00:10:00] and we’ve been working together and friends for a while and we’re still like, I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you.
I was depressed. I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you. I’m so sorry I’m late. And like even just being like, hey guy, it’s okay. Like, it takes a lifetime to be like, the rate at which we move is actually okay. You know that actually if we both got crazy and the brilliant project that we started in February is gonna be out a little bit later, that’s not necessarily a design flaw.
Like that might make it better because as Alice Wong said, good shit takes time. [00:10:30] And really working on Crip time means really drastically, like in real time, we have internalized what good organizing looks like, what pace it works at, what a disabled life is, all of that stuff.
So basically know you’re new here, but know that you don’t have to shrink, like, and really like, seek out disabled writing art and culture, right?
Like, Stacey invented the term Crip doula and I just wanna share that with folks.
To paraphrase and it’s in care work and in other places online [00:11:00] and in the Stacey syllabus that me and Alice put together after she passed.
But this just came out of a Facebook comment, like Stacey was like, yeah, a Crip doula is somebody who teaches you like, this is how you have sex, drive a wheelchair, hire an attendant, like work when you don’t know when you’re gonna throw up, like manage mental illness. manage your neurodiversity, like lower the lights.
and she’s like, it’s really about birthing into a different kind of disability or new kinds of disability. And she was like, you and me, Leah? We’re Crip doulas. Like, we’re just passing on what we know. And it’s not [00:11:30] just me and her. It’s so many disabled people who are like, yeah, let me share my experience.
Did you try this? You know, did you know, like Stacey has that story where she’s like, yeah, like. Sometimes I take off my sneakers when there’s no ramp and it’s just one step or two and I can bump my wheelchair over it. Or sometimes when I really don’t wanna talk to an annoying person who’s praying at me in public, I just pretend I can’t talk like. Shit like that.
Shit like that. I would say, if you’re newly disabled, um, would want you to know that that’s a thing, that this can be [00:12:00] both a death of your old self, but also a birth into a new one. And that you get, like Octavia Butler wrote “Kindness eases change” in Parable of the Sower. I think crip doula-hood eases the continual transformations of disabled life and that you get to figure this out with other people.
Um, and that’s part of the way disabled people love each other.
Miles Griffis: That’s so well said. I think, um, I mean, that was very true to my experience. Like it’s such a, it’s such a rebirth of your former self and letting [00:12:30] go and finding your new self new community. Um, yeah. I guess one question I really, uh, wanted to ask you about was. That I think a lot of our listeners will appreciate is sort of like a lot of themes in your collection are about the refusal to forget.
Um, there are so many layers, um, of that which our audience can relate to. As the pandemic continues and we get further and further away from its inflection point, how has your relationship with memory and grief changed?[00:13:00]
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: Mm. That’s such a good question.
I think that that’s part of why as a writer, like… years ago, someone was like, you put a lot of dates in your poetry. Why is that? And I was like, because I’m a disassociative neurodivergent survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and it’s always been really important for me to write down, this is what happened when. Um, I’m one of many writers who views my work as being part of an archivist practice of the oppressed, where [00:13:30] it’s like, let’s write down
like the big things that happen, the headlines, but also the headlines that are like the everyday disabled, queer and trans BIPOC life moments, which to me includes like COVID minutia. Um, so with this book, I’m really grateful that the section that’s called Pandemic Grief Year, which is a lot of like, here’s what the first year and a half of COVID was like.
I’m so glad I wrote that shit down because grief does fuck with your memory. I mean, [00:14:00] something that I’ve now passed on to people who are new grievers is I’m like, yo, it’s gonna feel like a traumatic brain injury. So just know that like if you drive, maybe don’t drive the first couple weeks. ’cause someone told me that and I was really grateful ’cause I would’ve driven off the road.
I couldn’t remember things. Things were really altered. Um. I’m really grateful that I wrote down those moments of early pandemic like lockdown and also, know, those moments that in a nest complicated way we now look back to with some nostalgia where I was like, whoa, [00:14:30] there was public health and you know, there was the good unemployment and there was like, you know, like eviction moratoriums in places and abled people cared about captions and masking.
Oh my goodness. You know, things like that.
And now we’re in a place where it’s really interesting where, I know there’s still out there, but it has been really different over the last two years, through a lot of disabled work where we were like, no, we’re gonna push back against that and really fight and keep putting out our zines and talking about masking and talk about mask protections[00:15:00]
everywhere, but like in a lot of, in the city where I live and in a lot of places I go to. Out of things. Also like the encampments movements against the enhanced genocide in Gaza where so many of those student organizers were like, we have to mask for, to both stop surveillance being able to capture our faces and also to not give each other COVID in the tents.
It has been an uprise again of like, wait, no, we really are all we have, so let’s mask and let’s take care of each other and let’s do COVID precautions. I’m like, that’s hopeful. So like it’s nice tracking, [00:15:30] here’s the up and down sine wave of how our movements and communities have responded to COVID. I mean, like Mia Mingus blog is/was called Leaving Evidence and you know, that goes back to ‘09 Disability Justice, where she’s like, we have to leave evidence that we were here as disabled people of color. And I still feel that that, like that’s the memory work and I think it becomes incredibly important or increasingly important when so many of us have cognitive, you know, effects and like memory issues from living with Long COVID [00:16:00] and post COVID stuff.
And so as that, disabled writing becomes a memory technology to be like, let’s leave notes for ourselves to remember like what we did, who we lived, where we failed, and what we experienced.
And even if you, you know, didn’t get COVID, or if you did, you, if you do have COVID, if you’ve had it 16 times and you have grief plus COVID effects, I think writing it down is like a medicine for that.
Betsy Ladyzhets: Um, yeah, I mean I think that’s so true and that is [00:16:30] really what, like a lot of what we try to do with The Sick Times as well in terms of having this record of what’s happening like in the Long COVID communities and the communities of people who are still trying to keep each other safe in this way.
Um. And yeah, I, I also have observed that in New York City where I am of like more people masking at demonstrations and stuff in the last couple of years. And I agree, it’s heartening. I also think it’s like we’re trying to give people the tools to keep talking about it at the new ideas [00:17:00] for ways to talk to your friends who are maybe the leftists who aren’t masking about
trying to get back into it or whatever.
Um, anyway. Yeah, so, so thank you for articulating all of that. Um, something else we wanted to ask you about is the profound loneliness of disability. both for people who are newer and. Have been at this for a long time. something that we get a lot at The Sick Times is emails from readers where people are just talking about their own treatments, that [00:17:30] they’ve been trying their struggles with, the medical system, their struggles with like fam friends and family who aren’t supporting them in the ways that they want to be supported.
Um, so for people you know, who can relate to that, I’m curious if there are lessons or wisdom that you would want to share on like how. How to cope with all of that.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: Yeah, I mean, I mean, first of all, I wanna name that like, I’m privileged in a lot of ways because I have friends who are, you know, have severe me, Long COVID, who are like, [00:18:00] maybe have recovered 4%, but like I’m in my room with the door closed like 98% of the time, and. really wanna lift up my friend Amber Ra, who’s like a long-term disability justice organizer and person and mom in Seattle who’s consistently says, please don’t forget about me and us.
Um, and I know that, it’s a spectrum, but like, I’m just like, yeah, I get to go outside. I have energy. Like that’s, that’s not something I take for granted. But as somebody who, you know, I got disabled, um, with Emmy in [00:18:30] 97 and I was living a. know, I’m on the floor 22 hours a day life, and there was no disability justice movement per se back then.
And I was really like a very young 22-year-old sick person who nobody I knew in movement really got it. And I ended up staying in an abusive relationship with somebody I had broken up with as a lover, but who was still in my life because he would bring me food and nobody else would like, everyone was like.
You’re sick. Oh, okay. Call us when you feel better. So, you know, I guess I wanna [00:19:00] share from those memories of, you know, being alone in my house. Um, I think the things that sustained me were spirituality.
I feel like a lot of people, including me, write about surviving out of spite. And honestly, that really helped me where I was like, fuck all of y’all. I’m just gonna keep this little heartbeat going and just like see what the future holds and like, you’re not gonna allow me to take myself out ’cause fuck you.
Um. You know, my little city polluted yard by the train tracks was really [00:19:30] important to me. Um, was just a lot of times where I’m like, the relationships I have are not with human beings. They’re with spirit. My yard, like the sky and library books, and. There was just a real strength in feeling really feral.
I’m like, I’m like this little weasel, you know, that’s like, has like five of energy that’s surviving. Right? So I guess I just wanna share that. And I don’t wanna say, and like, yeah, everything was wonderful because it was profoundly hard and terrifying [00:20:00] and had so much grief then around like these people who’ve abandoned me.
Like, what the fuck? And I had so much shame. so I guess I wanna share that experience if it’s helpful that like in my experience. Like I see people talk about like what community? There is no community, and I really know how real that is. And I was like, yeah. For me sometimes worked And again, take what you leave, leave the rest.
Is that it? When I couldn’t find community back then, I was just like, well fuck community, fuck people, like people suck. Like I’ll just be here on my own with my [00:20:30] thoughts and. I don’t think consciously, like in this moment, it makes me think of like histories of like, you know, Victorian shut-ins and like other people throughout time who survived isolation.
Um, and thinking about both those models as both like shit that we wanna move away from. ’cause we wanna be able to have community and love and people, and also those are some real badass motherfuckers who survived isolation on their own.
And that are ways of surviving in isolation that are absolutely val valued, [00:21:00] VA valuable and incredible. And that. We may not always be able to reach them, but there’s like we, and you know, when people say that phrase, you are not alone, the thing about isolation, it’s like you’re like, I am fucking alone motherfucker.
But also there’s long histories of sick people in our sick beds making shit up and fantasizing and moving one toe at a time and dreaming and that shit’s real.
Miles Griffis: For our last question, I’d want to talk, uh, bring this sort of back to love. Love is a theme that carries [00:21:30] through so much of your work. Um, all different types of love. So many different ways we see it, feel it, give it in this poetry collection. Uh, you can really feel the love all the way through and in so many different ways.
I think one poem that really stood out to us was. The one where the narrator is watching this young bi bipoc disabled couple from afar and getting emotional that their love exists and gets to be here. Um, how are you thinking about love these [00:22:00] days?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: well, I think. And this also touches on some of what you asked, like that $65 million question about how has your relationship to grief changed through the book? I think, I mean this is a truism, but just that like love does keep existing after death and that, um. I think some of my earlier griefs, some of like the earlier deaths, like the grief still in me, but it’s transformed and what’s left is the love.
You know, I still miss Stacey every day. I still miss ll every day. I still feel [00:22:30] gutted. Um, I went through a time this February where I was just like, damn. It’s like there are all these grief waves and they’re hitting each other and it’s turning into a grief tsunami. And also, um. I’m worried that in saying this, it’s gonna sound pat, and I don’t mean it that way, but like, I really like, I had a therapist who was like, yeah, like of course you want to, of course you get stuck in certain kinds of grief ’cause you don’t wanna forget the people you loved and you don’t want, like, the government’s [00:23:00] already trying to paper over their deaths and so many people’s deaths, so of course you wanna stay in the grief.
But also don’t want your like. The needle to get stuck on the one spot of the record, you wanna be able to feel other stuff. So I think that for me, I am in a place in my personal life where like loving well, including loving myself well, has become really important. where I’m just like, and it’s also being over 50 and still being alive, where I’m just like, I don’t have time for bullshit.
And I know. In a really not personal way. Like [00:23:30] what kind of love I want to put time and energy and spoons into and invest in. I hate that word because we’re not banks, like like re like put my resources to put my love and intention into. Um, and then that’s some of the ways in which my loved ones who are gone stick around.
Um. also joke that I feel like Alice is trying to get us all to have good, disabled sex and love, whatever that looks like. Where I was just like, okay, ma, thank you. you for these cute people who gave me their phone number and stuff over the last period of time. I appreciate [00:24:00] that. I think that in a lot of ways, I’ve always felt this way that like disabled and neurodivergent.
Like sexual and romantic and love relationships don’t look like conventional white abled, neurotypical ones, but like I’m really feeling into how we don’t have to hold ourself up to disabled measuring stick of like, this is what a real partnership is like, quote unquote real, that like I have so much richness of disabled love and intimacy in my life and it’s not.
the kind of love and partnership that I used to be like, [00:24:30] Ooh, I need to hold out for that because then I’ll have gotten what the abled get and that we’re banned from. I was like, yeah, no disrespect to that, but I don’t want it like I want to, I. I wanna go sit under the cherry blossoms with somebody who I’m like beloved and intimate with and like take photos and hold hands.
I wanna be sexual in different ways. I want to be loving different ways. I want to gently let go of people who I’m just like, yeah, I might care about you, but we’re not a good fit. Um, [00:25:00] those are some things, and I think that there’s ways, I don’t know if this will make sense, but I think that.
One of the ways in which grief can affect people, and it definitely affected me, is this feeling of like, oh fuck, I don’t know if you’re gonna be around tomorrow. I don’t know if I’m gonna be around tomorrow. So we gotta really rush. And I think that that’s real. And I mean, we’re, we’re recording this on the day where famously Trump has been like, hinting that, he’s like, I’m gonna, you know, unleash fire and brimstone on, on Iran
If, you know, the Strait of Ous isn’t [00:25:30] opened. So I’ve just been like having my ordinary day being like, I don’t know. Are we gonna be a nuclear war tonight? I, and there’s also a resistance to slowing down in slowing down and being like, no, fuck you.
I’m not gonna let the powers that be, I’m not gonna allow the powers that be to push me into microwaving my shit. gonna actually move with disabled slowness and let things unfold and allow myself to be curious and to be surprised and to let people surprise me and to be like, actually there might be [00:26:00] some real big good stuff that’s coming.
Like I don’t have to like pack it in real quick so they could kill us. I also can just like be expansive. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Betsy Ladyzhets: Yeah.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha: I remain really curious in this moment and. Joyful, hopeful about like how living in the eugenic pandemic on, um, and disabled mass grief and mass disablement is actually helping us find [00:26:30] new ways to love and be with each other that are actually better and more sustainable and not the really boring, able neurotypical bullshit, um, is what I would say. Yeah.
Betsy Ladyzhets: Yeah.
Miles Griffis: So well said.
Melanie Marich: Leah’s book, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, is out wherever you get your books. Leah also encouraged us to all ask our local libraries to stock it. Leah is also currently on their book tour promoting the collection, so if you wanna see if they’ll be visiting a city near you, we’ll link to that in the show [00:27:00] notes
Research updates
Melanie Marich: To wrap up this episode, here’s some of the latest in long COVID research updates. This is an excerpt from our weekly newsletter, and if you wanna learn more links will be in the show notes.
Miles Griffis: A non-invasive vagal nerve stimulation did not improve Long COVID. A non-invasive vagal nerve stimulation did not improve Long COVID fatigue. That’s according to one clinical trial out of [00:27:30] Germany. 45 people used either a sham device or a specific vagus nerve stimulation device known as A-T-A-V-N-S.
These devices have been shown to help with fatigue and. These devices have been shown to help with fatigue in some autoimmune diseases, which the researchers suggested means that Long COVID associated fatigue may not share those same mechanisms.
Betsy Ladyzhets: There’s a new study out comparing two common types of dysautonomia in Long COVID. [00:28:00] Researchers in Sweden found overlap between the two types of dysautonomia, which according to them, strengthens the theory of shared pathophysiology of the disorders. The authors concluded that Long COVID can impact the cardiac system in different ways, underscoring the need for tailored diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.
Miles Griffis: German health insurance companies will cover four [00:28:30] off-label drugs for Long COVID and related diseases. According to a German health agency, the drugs include ivabradine, a heart failure drug used off-label for pots and the diabetes drug metformin. Which research has shown may prevent Long COVID.
Still, journalist Martin Rücker argues that policy is a symbol of public health failure, since little is being done for people with these diseases.
Outro
Betsy Ladyzhets: That’s all for this week’s episode.[00:29:00]
Miles Griffis: In the meantime, we’ll continue reporting the information that you need.
Betsy Ladyzhets: Solidarity with everyone still [00:29:30] here.
Melanie Marich: This podcast and The Sick Times are supported by you. You can help us keep this work going by donating on our website. Still here is a production of The Sick Times, a nonprofit newsroom chronicling the ongoing long COVID crisis. Our theme song for this episode is The Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s Rendition of which side are You on originally by Florence Reese.
I’m Melanie Marich and I produce this [00:30:00] episode. Our engagement editor is Heather Hogan. Sophie Dimitri designed our podcast cover Art and Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets are your co-host and The Sick Times co-founders. Thanks for listening.
