The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Wesleyan University student to explore pain management. policy around world
MIDDLETOWN — In April 2019, Middlesex County EMT and Wesleyan University student Livia Cox responded to a medical call where she encounters an unconscious and pale patient.
She eyes a pill bottle in the room, and although the man is dead, she begins chest compressions anyway “with every joule of energy and every compassionate bone in me,” she said.
Cox had met this patient before. They’ve discussed his comorbid chronic physical and mental pain and substance dependency at length.
A former military man, he has frequent PTSD episodes. He’s been prescribed opioids for his joint pain, but help more with his insomnia.
“On the dark and winding road back to the station, I thought about how I’ll document his death: ‘death by overdose.’ But I don’t think that tells the whole story; opioids weren’t the sole causal agent,” she says. “I think about how as a society, we honor those who died in combat, but fail to care for those who didn’t.
“And I think about the ways in which I, as an EMT, am complicit in this — providing transport, preventing death, but perpetuating a system that fails to address or consider the malady’s root cause,” she added.
As the recipient of a 2022 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Cox will spend a year exploring the cultural and political valences
of pain and cultural and societal responses to it.
By visiting hospitals, pain clinics, drug consumption rooms, and treatment centers; learning from doulas, plant experts, and traditional healing practices, Cox hopes to answer such
questions and better understand how pain is managed, fought, accepted, celebrated, and ignored.
Her proposed project, titled “Pain, Policy, and the Person” will take her around the world to Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Kenya, Peru, Switzerland, Togo and Vietnam.
The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship is a one-year grant for purposeful, independent exploration outside the United States, awarded to graduating college seniors. It comes with a $36,000 stipend.
Ultimately, Cox is hoping to apply to medical school and continue her
work with the Middletown Harm Reduction Initiative, which she co-founded while a student at Wesleyan.
“At 21, I play multiple roles in a flawed health care system, unable to reconcile that which I experience with that which I envision,” she
wrote in her Watson project proposal. “But, at 31, with degrees in medicine and public health, I want to be creating policies that will make a difference.”