The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Everything Is An Emergency

bessstillman.substack.com

I'm Bess Stillman: ER doctor, writer, recent widow to Jake Seliger, who died of SCC of the tongue, and soon-to-be Mom to Athena. I write about the challenges of being corporeal. Here you'll find essays on life, death, cancer, love, health & healthcare. Click to read Everything Is An Emergency, by Be

Essays / personalScience

’23’24’25’26
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45 from 28 Aug 2023 to 18 Sep 2025
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2025 4

  1. Oh fuck, you're still sad?
  2. Seeing as a doctor, seeing as a wife
  3. The Seliger Act (HB701): Testimony for a New Law
  4. The Year I Didn't Survive

2024 21

  1. The "YaYa Yeet and Pop Drop": Dumping The Elderly At The ER Is A Cherished Tradition
  2. The Book of Love
  3. In Memory of Jake
  4. How to let go: one life ends while another begins
  5. The drugs killing dying patients are the drugs they can't get.
  6. Me on Richard Hanania's CSPI podcast
  7. An Atlas of Vanishing Places
  8. Heloooo, nurse!
  9. Debugging the Doctor Brain
  10. The dangers of walking include falling in love
  11. Phone Calls To Tongueless Men
  12. mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less
  13. Pulse Check: The unexpected gift of long COVID. Could new research treat chronic fatigue syndromes and cure cancer?
  14. Love has won: strangers, lovers, and the doctors who bet on them in a NYC ER.
  15. Cancer Speaks Its Own Language
  16. In defense of boring.
  17. Seven days of silence: a chatterbox's lament
  18. Pulse Check: "Does OTC nasal spray Azelastine hold a key to COVID and respiratory virus prevention and treatment?"
  19. The calculus of connection and the PEG tube struggle.
  20. "Pulse Check": The Guide to Choosing a Healthcare Facility
  21. Introducing "Pulse Check": Your health questions answered

2023 20

  1. How the light gets in: a solstice at the border of life and death
  2. Remembering things that haven't happened yet
  3. Reactions to "Please be dying, but not too quickly" and what it's like for patients
  4. Just because you won't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there
  5. The "YaYa Yeet and Pop Drop": Dumping The Elderly At The ER Is A Cherished Tradition
  6. I'm homeless if Jake is not my home
  7. Uncertainty is the state of being alive
  8. My A+ in mental health: am I doing wellness now?
  9. Please be dying, but not too quickly, part 3: the end of the journey
  10. Please be dying, but not too quickly, part 2: The patient's perspective
  11. Please be dying, but not too quickly, part 1: a clinical trial story
  12. Forever is such a short, long time
  13. Jake's Writing: links to the Story's Story
  14. Days of Awe: The clinical trial drug that might save my husband's life
  15. It Only Takes 200 Joules To Restart A Heart
  16. On Writing (or not) Part Three: What I’m Doing Now, and Will Continue To Do
  17. On Writing (or not) Part Two: Death is the Ultimate Deadline
  18. On Writing (or not): Part One
  19. Attachment is suffering, attachment is love
  20. What's it like being married to a dying man?