As a linguist, I want to find the words to measure chronic illness
Heather Hogan / The Sick Times Let me paint a scene that is all too familiar: I’m not feeling well (again), I go to the doctor (again), they take some blood (again; I turn my head away) and poke at me in whatever way my insurance company deems appropriate. The result is a long sheet of seemingly arbitrary numbers that indicate something about my metabolic processes and the resulting sensations, and I leave without much information aside from some variation of: “These tests tell me that your bo