Oprah Daily: How to Save Your Life (While Fighting Health Insurance Conglomerates)

Written By AMANDA M. FAIRBANKS

It was November of 2022 when I found myself sitting at an Upper East Side café, slowly sipping an oat milk cappuccino, willing myself back into the land of the living.

Little did these women, seated all around me, know that in the tower some ten floors above them, patients—their eyes covered in light-blocking masks, their ears covered in noise-canceling headphones that played ambient music—were tripping out of their minds on IV ketamine in an attempt to cure themselves of the black dog.

For 60 to 90 minutes, a nurse practitioner sat patiently in the darkness with each one, monitoring their pulse and keeping watch and bearing witness. I should know: I was one such patient.

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AMANDA M. FAIRBANKS

Amanda M. Fairbanks is an award-winning journalist and author of The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the East Hampton Star. A graduate of Smith College and a former Teach for America corps member, she has two master’s degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The California native lives with her family in Sag Harbor.

https://www.amandamfairbanks.com
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