(Peter Cobb, 8/19/2026)
In August 2008, Melissa Houser was in line at a grocery store in New York City. The next thing she knew, she was face down on the floor. Later, she learned she had experienced a “syncope without prodrome,” the sudden loss of consciousness that occurs without warning signs or symptoms.
Her stay at the emergency room was an eye-opener for her. It revealed to her what’s wrong with the U.S. healthcare system and provided insight and knowledge that she used when she became a physician four years later.
She waited for several hours to see a physician. When she finally met him, she writes in her new book, “A Failure of Imagination: How the Healthcare System Fails Neurodivergent People,” he asked her just one question: “What were you doing today?”
She told him she was packing to move to Vermont for medical school.
“Oh, that sounds stressful. You must have had a panic attack,” he said.
“Diagnosis, made. Case Closed. Female-presenting patients must, of course, be hysterical,” she wrote. “That was not my first experience with how the healthcare system listens or, rather, doesn’t listen to patients.”
Earlier in her life, when she was 16, Houser had experienced the worst headache of her life. The headache lasted 13 days. When she got to the hospital, she was given a dose of Compazine for nausea, a “symptom I had not complained of,” she wrote.
All of a sudden she couldn’t breathe. The drug had paralyzed half of her diaphragm. She is among the 10% who have dystonic reactions to Compazine. Dystonic refers to a condition characterized by involuntary muscle contractions.
She tried to explain that she couldn’t breathe, but no one understood her.
“I have no idea what words came out; I was an unrecognized Autistic person and my speech was likely compromised by the distress that came with the feeling of suffocation. I will never forget the desperation of being unable to communicate what was happening in my body in a way that healthcare professionals could understand,” she wrote.
Her book, published by Beaver’s Pond Press, a hybrid publisher based in St. Paul, Minnesota, is scheduled for debut in September. It explores how the current healthcare system routinely creates barriers for neurodivergent individuals like herself and shows what is possible when those systems are redesigned with accessibility at their core.
The audience of the book, she said, is “anyone who has felt the system wasn’t built for them and for the people who love and support them.”
