So much cancer support is about ‘masking cancer’: how to wear your makeup and etch your eyebrows so that no one can tell that you’re ‘sick’. How to wear your wig so that no one can tell you’ve lost your hair. And, in the case of prostheses, how to hide your mastectomy. I’m so tired of hiding the truth of cancer. Why is the onus on me to look like I ‘don’t have cancer’, in addition to going through cancer treatment?

By mid-2020 my service was experiencing more than a 50 per cent increase in demand, which my colleagues and I struggled to meet. We were ear-witnesses to the impact of Covid-19 on the mental health of new and expecting parents. The phone was like a relentlessly crying newborn.

As a global pandemic joins a long list of catastrophes that have simply become a fact of ordinary life, it seems more urgent than ever to revisit and reimagine the fictions governing the accident. Conditions of debilitation, and the bodies that suffer them, deserve nothing less.

Men who have sex with men are largely banned from donating blood in Australia and the United States. The ban on gay blood donations is a hangover from nearly half a century ago, when much less was known about HIV & AIDS. Individual donors should be assessed based on their individual risk—not their gender or sexuality.

My brothers in the Park Hotel prison in Carlton, Melbourne, are living in a hell that is unimaginable to those of us outside. Of the forty-five refugees held in those rooms without fresh air, twenty have so far tested positive to Covid-19. Each of those men is labouring under great pressure on their minds and spirits, the fear that no one will move them to a safe place to stop the transmission and to treat the sick.

A safe injecting room in Melbourne saved at least twenty-one lives in its first eighteen months of operations, and prevented 270 serious overdose incidents. No-one Safe injecting rooms save lives: Build them. Defend them.

What distinguishes a doctor from a scientist or a textbook is their figuration in culture, their supposed ability to incorporate something more artful than scientific into the treatment, and their manner at the bedside. It’s for that reason we can say that the doctor presented as ‘Dr Death’ is indeed monstrous – but monstrous in the most doctorly way. Monstrous inasmuch as what is doctor in him has grown malignant.

BMI is an antiquated, inadequate, and potentially racist measure of health. Which is why I was rather surprised last week when I got a text from a friend and fellow parent – who also happens to be a clinical psychologist – asking me if my daughter was okay. She was concerned because apparently our eighth graders had been made to calculate and report on their own BMI in class.

Many obesity researchers don't appropriately considered the quality of life or mental wellbeing of their patients as a result of these extreme interventions, which is precisely the problem. In their zeal to solve the ‘obesity epidemic’ by any means necessary, they lose sight of the fact that the fat people in their trials are precisely that – people.

Michael Roe’s retelling of Australia’s public health story from 1884 to about 1921 made me see that nothing we’re going through is new. Every mistake we’re making has been made before, and every strength we have has been in us all along.

The idea that the government was safeguarding public health by imprisoning asylum seekers is riddled with inconsistencies. Our understanding of immunity is used to justify warlike approaches to medicine and the organisation of society, antithetical to healing or collectivity.

If, like 10-15 per cent of the global population, you have been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), you are likely female and young. If your symptoms remain unresolved despite your best dietary restriction efforts, immediately request referral for non-routine testing. You may have an undiagnosed illness – because your pain has been sold to you as a product of ‘stress’. In other words, you have just been diagnosed with hysteria.

It is tempting to dismiss Evans as unhinged, but it would be a mistake to view his radicalisation trajectory in isolation. Since the onset of the pandemic, some quarters of the wellness industry have been taken in by conspiritualist ideas, including those of QAnon. Militant wellness – think singing bowls, praise for Trump and the use of weapons – is now a thing.

It is the end of the world we knew. Just as cancer presents a schism in personal timelines, a radical before-and-after, we exist inescapably in a timeline where this pandemic is taking place.

We might learn that our individual fates are inherently bound up in the collective and perhaps, like Daniel Defoe, we too might come to regret ‘the return of all manner of wickedness among us’ as this crisis eventually abates.

This World Hearing Day, as well as thinking about the ten thousand people whose first language is Auslan, or the half a million people who will be buying hearing aids this year, I’ll also be thinking of those thousands of Australians around my age who are unable to afford to get help. The Hearing Awareness Week slogan in 2020 is ‘Don’t let hearing loss limit you’. I only wonder if the Government is listening at all.