The Painful Year
Not a great year for me, but I'm slowly coming back.
by Ben Cohen
When looking back through our archives for 2023 (you can see a selection of our best work below), I realized I barely remembered anything myself or the Banter team had written. I was diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia back in March and have spent the past nine months desperately trying to consume enough iron to correct it. The ordeal was incredibly painful and immensely psychologically challenging, making it by far the hardest year of my life.
If you haven’t experienced anemia, let me tell you, it is quite possibly the worst experience imaginable. For close to seven months I experienced constant racing heart, chronic headaches, insomnia, body shakes, extreme fatigue and anxiety on a daily basis. I’ve had to go to hospital multiple times and have been hooked up to a a heart rate monitor for several days to ensure nothing was seriously wrong. I lived in a sort of tortuous purgatory, intellectually aware my suffering would end at some point, but convinced I was dying due to the severity of the symptoms.
Apparently I do not absorb non-animal based iron very well, so not eating meat for several years had a very severe consequence on my iron levels. Just as it can take a very long time to deplete your body’s store of iron, it can take an equally long time to get them back up again. Consequently most anemia sufferers get stuck in a vicious cycle of needing iron to correct anemia, but then experiencing severe side effects from taking too much. I would stop to let my stomach recover, then in a matter of days, the anemia symptoms come roaring back.
Thankfully after roughly 200 steaks (not an exaggeration) and a ludicrous amount of iron tablets, I’m out the other side of this horrendous ordeal, albeit not without some lingering symptoms. I still have quite a bit of fatigue, some memory issues, and iron oxidation has wrecked my stomach. I also have a shockingly bad level of fitness given I haven’t been able to do any real exercise for almost a year. Otherwise, I’m sleeping a lot better, don’t experience horrible heart palpitations, and I can finally function during the day
My improved condition means I’m very much looking forward to 2024 — not because of what we’re about to go through politically — but because I no longer feel like I’m dying. Which is an incredibly low bar of course, but not when you’ve spent half the year unable to get out of bed.
Just in time!
Thankfully my physical health has returned just in time to throw myself into what will no doubt be the most gruesome presidential election contest in American history. Bob, Justin and I got lunch together earlier this month and confessed to each other that we were genuinely dreading the election. “People really aren’t aware of what the stakes are,” Bob told me despondently. “Which is fucking insane.”
2023 was the year America decided to finally hold Donald Trump accountable for a stunning litany of grievous crimes. But it turns out half the country couldn’t care less:
While I’m not overly worried about Biden’s chances in the coming election, I do think the current polls are a shocking indictment of America’s attention span. Trump killed several hundred thousand Americans through his shocking ineptitude during Covid, then tried to overthrow the government when he lost the election in 2020. The fact that any American would even entertain giving him the keys to the White House again is utterly insane. But then this is America, and the sequel always has to be bigger, crazier, and more explosive than the first.
The warm up
2023, it seems, was very much the warm up for what is about to happen. We’ve witnessed an extraordinary spectacle featuring the former president that now has him up on four separate criminal investigations. Here’s a brief overview of what Trump has in store for him in the coming months:
Federal Indictment (Classified Documents Case): 37 felony counts including willful retention of classified records and obstruction-related charges.
New York Indictment: 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
Georgia Indictment: 13 charges related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, including violations of the Georgia RICO Act and other related charges.
January 6th Case: Charges related to the Capitol attack.
Three of these cases will be heard in court in March and May of 2024, and could go on for months. Trump is not president so he has to show up, which means much of the election season is going to be spent covering Trump’s trials. The seriousness of the cases and the overwhelming evidence against him is likely to do him significant political damage, and it will prevent him from serious campaigning around the country. This is all good news for President Biden, but given his low popularity polling and perceived physical frailty, the election will almost certainly be close.
We’re gearing up for maximum chaos here at The Banter, and we will do our best to cover the unfolding psychodrama as best we can. It is going to be grim. Very, very grim. But we will try to keep you sane as we march towards November and the fate of democratic rule in America.
I’d like to thank Banter readers for their support and loyalty over the past year. I have done my best to keep up with the rigors of daily publishing/podcasting/editing despite my health and hope we’ve kept our end of the bargain. We’ve had a huge influx of new readers and subscribers in 2023, and it has surprisingly turned out to be our fastest growing year on record. I’ve also received many personal notes from Banter readers wishing me well and that has meant an awful lot. Writing about my illness on The Banter has been a refuge for me, not just because it allowed me to share what was happening, but because it allowed me to interact with you all. Although this is my full time job, it still feels like a real privilege.
See you next year!
Ben
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Some highlights from 2023:
January:
February:
March:
April (for Banter Members):
May:
June:
July:
August (for Banter Members):
September:
October (for Banter Members):
November:
December:
First of all, I’m glad that you’re doing better!
Second, and unlike you, I am extremely worried that Trump will win in November of next year.
Glad you’re feeling better. We need you this year more than most