A history of the Ukraine war in 48 dentists
Wendell Stevenson on how Russia's invasion has created an "epidemic of phantom pain".
Wendell Steavenson won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2024 for her reporting in 1843, a digital magazine published by The Economist.
In the latest edition Stevenson chronicles how, as well as the more than 12,000 Ukranian deaths and more than 29,000 wounded, Russia’s invasion has created an “epidemic of phantom pain”.
Stevenson describes her own travails while suffering from the effects of a remnant of the bone that had once gripped her wisdom tooth. With this physical pain while reporting on the war, and other conflicts around the world, came emotional pain.
“Over a summer on holiday, my teeth stopped hurting. But the moment I started travelling and reporting again, my gums flared with successive infections,” she writes. “Travelling between different war zones, time zones and climates put my body under stress: my immune system was vulnerable, my nervous system was sensitised and my mouth was susceptible to pH imbalances and bacterial flare-ups. After infection and surgeries, my upper-right gum was suffering trauma.”
Stevenson recounts many visits to dentists as well as meeting a group of women exposed to the war as either journalists or volunteers. “Marta was 26 and researching the kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russia. Her health problems also flared up in wartime. ‘I have phantom pains in the back of my knees and it’s the same with one eye,’ she said. ‘But the most extreme problem is my neurodermatitis. It’s incredibly itchy. If there is bad news or a battle, I scratch until it bleeds.’”
Visits to all kinds of doctors were inconclusive. Finally, suffering from stomach cramps, Marta went to a gastroenterologist who said he was seeing many people with a “bouquet of diseases”, as she put it. “He was the first one who told me that everything I described was coming from stress,” said Marta.