Portland, OR, September 24, 2026 --( PR.com )-- Unsolicited Press announces the publication of Bone Deep: Love and Survival in a Broken Healthcare System, a searching new work of nonfiction by career journalist and former Ashland, Oregon, Mayor Julie Akins.
Akins was accustomed to asking difficult questions during the decades she spent reporting on poverty and homelessness. As mayor, she understood the public language of policy, budgets, civic responsibility, and reform. Then illness entered her own home.
After Akins’s husband, Leo, suffered a devastating stroke that was not properly diagnosed until the window for critical treatment had closed, she became his caregiver, advocate, medical researcher, and last defense against an increasingly indifferent bureaucracy. At the same time, her own body began to fail. A specialist raised the possibility of carcinoid syndrome, a rare form of cancer, but Julie was left without a confirmed diagnosis or coordinated path forward.
While caring for Leo, searching for answers, and attempting to meet the demands of public office, Akins watched the distance between the promise of American healthcare and its lived reality collapse around her.
In Bone ...