The only thing worse than having a frightening debilitating condition is not knowing what exactly that condition is. That's the predicament that former Gawker and Slate editor Tom Scocca details in a lengthy essay in New York Magazine, laying out the mystery malady that has plagued him now for months. Scocca had his first bout with COVID last summer, then fell on a New York City subway platform in September. But those events coincided with a period of unemployment for Scocca, and they'd been preceded and accompanied by a range of alarming, sometimes odd symptoms, from pins and needles in his arms, swollen feet, and stiff fingers, to shortness of breath, trouble swallowing, and increased weakness. A barrage of tests during an extended hospital stay turned up nothing conclusive. "There was zero explanation," the 52-year-old writes. "There was, maybe, the absolutely obvious explanation: that I was stressing myself into this over money."
"It was my bad luck, the attending doctor said at my bedside, to be an interesting case," Scocca adds of one of his meetings with baffled medical staff. What various tests were able to narrow things down to is that Scocca was afflicted with something that was weakening his muscles, which wasn't surprising to Scocca. "The most minimal movements were the most impossible," he notes. A muscle biopsy was scheduled, but Scocca notes that "as the time came closer, I began to apprehend an uncomfortable truth. The actual medical mystery wasn't about anything inside me. It was whether the tests were going to point to some far side of this where I got my life back." More here from Scocca on what happened next, including his continued lack of a definitive diagnosis. (Scocca, who's mulled death before, isn't the first Gawker Media staffer to be stymied by a life-altering condition.)
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