![]() ![]() The couple was sitting next to each other in their apartment building in Glendale this winter, just a few weeks after moving cross-country. But what I believe is that she’s a credible advocate of what’s going on in her own body.” Because even years into this, I’m like, ‘Wait, this doesn’t make sense to me.’ She’ll have a reaction to something in the air and I don’t have that reaction, so it’s sort of discordant. “At a certain point, I just had to trust her. “One of the most unsettling moments in our marriage was after I had just read this book that said it was all in her head,” said Wasow, 46. At first, he was frustrated: “What do you mean you can’t get up and help with some mundane thing around the house?” he’d think. They could still go on bike rides together, but Brea would do six miles instead of the usual 12.Īs her illness worsened, Wasow became Brea’s full-time caretaker. Brea was sick, but neither was aware how serious her condition was. By the time they married in 2012 - the ceremony was led by their Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. They were both intellectually curious, and in the first year of their courtship, they traveled around the world exploring foreign countries. Eleven years older than Brea, he had already built up an impressive résumé, serving as a technology reporter on NBC and even helping to teach Oprah Winfrey how to use the internet on her talk show. When the couple met, Wasow was also working toward his PhD at Harvard. ![]() While the film serves as a medical explainer, it’s also a love story, following the relationship between Brea and her husband, Omar Wasow. this weekend and will be shown on PBS in January. Which is why Brea made “Unrest,” a documentary about her battle with ME/CFS that opened in L.A. ![]() There is no cure, and only about $6 million in public research funding is devoted toward the condition annually. Indeed, the illness consists of far more than just a proclivity for napping patients experience something called post-exertional malaise, which means that if they exert even the smallest amount of energy, they are struck down with debilitating mental and physical fatigue. One told her she had conversion disorder, a psychiatric illness that stems from a hidden trauma and was commonly referred to as “hysteria” in the late 19th century. She went to a number of doctors, but none was able to get to the bottom of her mysterious condition. She felt like she’d lost her grasp of the English language, substituting the word “hope” for something arbitrary, like “rake.” When she’d try to work on a paper, all of the words would come out in the wrong order. She’d write one sentence of an email and then pass out for four hours. And yet long after the fever broke, she still felt like her brain was misfiring. ![]() At first, she didn’t think anything of the illness - it just seemed like a particularly bad case of the flu, one that came along with a 104-degree fever. At 28, she was already an accomplished academic, a graduate of Princeton who’d moved to Massachusetts to delve into the world of political economy and statistics.īut in the midst of her studies, she got sick. Jennifer Brea was a PhD candidate at Harvard University when her mind started to fail her. ![]()
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