You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.69 AVERAGE
3.69 AVERAGE
SO much love for this book, a 5+++ book for me. This is the kind of book you keep a copy of and give as gifts. I plan especially to give this to many of the doctors I’ve seen over the years. If you identify as a woman, or a man, or have a body and especially if your body is behaving in mystifying ways and most importantly If you have a position of power or counsel to someone with a body stop everything and READ THIS BOOK!! It should be required reading for any medical or health professional (alongside books acknowledging horrifying medical treatment for more diverse populations of people.)
Sarah’s incredibly courageous journey to be seen and helped was raw and epic in scope. The blatant brutality and callousness she endured at the hands of western doctors and the zeal and artifice of alternative medicine “cures” are both explored. Thankfully, she ultimately lands on a place of healing, hope and continued discovery. Hard to read and so worth it.
And yes, this is a story of a privileged white woman with resources most do not have. I wish she would have acknowledged that directly in the book. It did not detract from her story for me but will propel me to read more diversely on this topic. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is one I thought was excellent. Other suggestions?
Sarah’s incredibly courageous journey to be seen and helped was raw and epic in scope. The blatant brutality and callousness she endured at the hands of western doctors and the zeal and artifice of alternative medicine “cures” are both explored. Thankfully, she ultimately lands on a place of healing, hope and continued discovery. Hard to read and so worth it.
And yes, this is a story of a privileged white woman with resources most do not have. I wish she would have acknowledged that directly in the book. It did not detract from her story for me but will propel me to read more diversely on this topic. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is one I thought was excellent. Other suggestions?
informative
slow-paced
Read because of mention by author Maggie Stiefvater on her Facebook page.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical trauma
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
There were aspects of this book that reminded me of my own health journey. Like the time a back specialist told me my pain was not congruent with my MRI and I should go down the hall and talk to someone about CBD. It was also very affirming to hear her talk about things I've learned over the past couple of years (gluten, gut health, yoga, rest, etc). There were also challenging parts that have encouraged me to add a few more layers to my health regimen. I'm so grateful for Sarah and her story. There were parts of the book that seemed to drag or that felt redundant. But overall, it was an important read.
5 stars
"We are women with mysterious illnesses, and we are everywhere".
As a person that has multiple chronic illnesses, I knew I had to read this book. When I was 17, I went to my GP and gave her a list of my symptoms and asked her if I could have endometriosis. She said I was too young but sent me for more testing. Over the next 7 years I was passed round many different specialists and doctors, at one point being told I had a brain tumour...only for a month later being told that I actually didn't. I was told my illness was all in my head. That I was making up the pain. That I was an attention seeker or depressed. After 7 years I moved for work and saw a new GP who sent me straight away to see a new gynaecologist who after a laparoscopy, diagnosed me with endometriosis. A whole 7 years after I asked if I could have that exact disease but got shot down, told I was crazy and left utterly demoralised and upset.
I am not the odd one out. The majority of women with invisible or mysterious illnesses will go through the exact same treatment.
This book is an incredible story about how Sarah Ramey was treated by the medical community in the USA and how her very real illnesses were ignored or that they were psychological.
This book made me cry, feel utterly shocked and yet also didnt surprise me. Sarah's illnesses and her medical journey is shocking.
She writes so incredibly well about her experiences but also about the medical community, ways to help yourself and why women receive such poor medical treatment.
This book looks into more "mysterious" invisible illnesses such as lyme, fibromyalgia, lupus, candida and CFS/ME. If you suffer from any of these illnesses or any other invisible illnesses, I urge you to read this book.
I wish I could put this book into the hands of every healthcare professional. Every woman that has been made to feel crazy due to her illness.
I know it will make women with illness feel less alone and I hope it will make them stand up and fight for their health when those that should be helping them let them down.
This is a brilliant book and I cannot recommend it enough. Thank you Sarah for supporting us with your writing.
Please note that I was gifted this book in exchange for an honest review.
"We are women with mysterious illnesses, and we are everywhere".
As a person that has multiple chronic illnesses, I knew I had to read this book. When I was 17, I went to my GP and gave her a list of my symptoms and asked her if I could have endometriosis. She said I was too young but sent me for more testing. Over the next 7 years I was passed round many different specialists and doctors, at one point being told I had a brain tumour...only for a month later being told that I actually didn't. I was told my illness was all in my head. That I was making up the pain. That I was an attention seeker or depressed. After 7 years I moved for work and saw a new GP who sent me straight away to see a new gynaecologist who after a laparoscopy, diagnosed me with endometriosis. A whole 7 years after I asked if I could have that exact disease but got shot down, told I was crazy and left utterly demoralised and upset.
I am not the odd one out. The majority of women with invisible or mysterious illnesses will go through the exact same treatment.
This book is an incredible story about how Sarah Ramey was treated by the medical community in the USA and how her very real illnesses were ignored or that they were psychological.
This book made me cry, feel utterly shocked and yet also didnt surprise me. Sarah's illnesses and her medical journey is shocking.
She writes so incredibly well about her experiences but also about the medical community, ways to help yourself and why women receive such poor medical treatment.
This book looks into more "mysterious" invisible illnesses such as lyme, fibromyalgia, lupus, candida and CFS/ME. If you suffer from any of these illnesses or any other invisible illnesses, I urge you to read this book.
I wish I could put this book into the hands of every healthcare professional. Every woman that has been made to feel crazy due to her illness.
I know it will make women with illness feel less alone and I hope it will make them stand up and fight for their health when those that should be helping them let them down.
This is a brilliant book and I cannot recommend it enough. Thank you Sarah for supporting us with your writing.
Please note that I was gifted this book in exchange for an honest review.
This is a MUST MUST read for everyone, not just sick women. They have been invisible for too long. Full review up on blog next week, www.therapybooknook.com/blog
Fascinating beginning, she talked extensively about her medical experiences and the experiences of her fellow WOMIs. 4/5 star beginning and I RECOMMENDED IT to a chronically ill friend. Then I started noticing small things, like how the author talks about chronic illness but never mentions how hard this can be on poor people (in fact, she claims developing countries have almost nonexistent rates of autoimmune disease because they don’t eat as much artificial food??). A little skewed but okay. Then she went all Eye of the Tiger soundtrack about how men and women are inherently different (with women having gifts of empathy and gentleness and men being able to fight in battles) and how getting rid of gender undermines the Divine Feminine and uh... I kept going for about 50 pages and it was still going. So I quit reading it.
It started off really interesting and promising and informative but then nose dived into a weird place.
It started off really interesting and promising and informative but then nose dived into a weird place.
DNF at 35 pages.
Under normal circumstances, I do not rate books that I haven't finished, but this is so genuinely awful that I must. Also, even though I only made it thirty-five pages into the book, I did skim ahead and read other sections to confirm that it wasn't worth my time to keep going.
Originally, I was excited and hopeful for this book, since there are so few memoirs about women's mysterious health complaints, but this dive-bombed from page one. The writing style is composed of constant, abrupt paragraph breaks, fragmented sentences, and redundancy, and even though the constant line breaks might make the 400+ pages go by more quickly, I value my time too much to read a book written like a stream-of-consciousness, badly edited blog post.
However, it's not just the writing style. I also had to set the book down for several minutes to recover from almost blacking out. I was deeply unprepared for the graphic medical details, and even though I know that I'm a wimp, I cannot commit to reading a book with graphic details about someone's horrific gynecological operations. I can't do it. And yes, I recognize what a very privileged thing that is to say, considering that this woman actually experienced them, but I know my limits, and I can't do this.
On a different note, I am extremely unimpressed with the author's self-absorbed perspective. Even when she writes about other women's troubles, she filters this through how it makes her feel, and she completely disregards men who have mysterious health problems. I have absolutely no problem with this book focusing on women, since, after all, women are the statistical majority when it comes to chronic illness, and are disbelieved, disregarded, and told that they're imagining things. However, there is a difference between focusing on women's issues and brushing off sick and suffering men as irrelevant.
For example, she makes hay out of the fact that 75% of Lyme patients are female. This is a huge percentage, but still, that means that 25% of Lyme patients are men, and you also have to consider that as she had already stated and explained, women are more likely to pursue healthcare options and deal with physical ailments. She had already written about how often women save men's lives by encouraging their husbands or relatives to go see a doctor, but she never evaluates how this would affect diagnostic statistics. Yes, there are lots of diseases that predominately affect women, but there are also men who are suffering without answers or help, or who feel pressured to be strong, not complain, and not seek help because of negative social messages that affect them.
Again, I think it's completely fine and good for this book to focus on women's health problems, but I wish that the author could have done so without making it sound like men don't also suffer from mysterious ailments, and like the ones who do aren't important. That really turned me off, and some of the things that she says come off as very mocking, like saying that if men were having all these issues, then there would be research and funding! Her smug tone and complete disregard for men who are suffering from the same types of autoimmune issues disgusted me.
After I gave up on this book, I read several other one-star or two-star reviews here on Goodreads and was amazed to learn how much worse it got. If I hadn't planned to read this since I first heard about it, and had seen recent reviews first, I never would have borrowed this from the library. However, since I did, I am adding my voice to the critical chorus, addressing the issues that I saw in the first thirty-five pages.
Under normal circumstances, I do not rate books that I haven't finished, but this is so genuinely awful that I must. Also, even though I only made it thirty-five pages into the book, I did skim ahead and read other sections to confirm that it wasn't worth my time to keep going.
Originally, I was excited and hopeful for this book, since there are so few memoirs about women's mysterious health complaints, but this dive-bombed from page one. The writing style is composed of constant, abrupt paragraph breaks, fragmented sentences, and redundancy, and even though the constant line breaks might make the 400+ pages go by more quickly, I value my time too much to read a book written like a stream-of-consciousness, badly edited blog post.
However, it's not just the writing style. I also had to set the book down for several minutes to recover from almost blacking out. I was deeply unprepared for the graphic medical details, and even though I know that I'm a wimp, I cannot commit to reading a book with graphic details about someone's horrific gynecological operations. I can't do it. And yes, I recognize what a very privileged thing that is to say, considering that this woman actually experienced them, but I know my limits, and I can't do this.
On a different note, I am extremely unimpressed with the author's self-absorbed perspective. Even when she writes about other women's troubles, she filters this through how it makes her feel, and she completely disregards men who have mysterious health problems. I have absolutely no problem with this book focusing on women, since, after all, women are the statistical majority when it comes to chronic illness, and are disbelieved, disregarded, and told that they're imagining things. However, there is a difference between focusing on women's issues and brushing off sick and suffering men as irrelevant.
For example, she makes hay out of the fact that 75% of Lyme patients are female. This is a huge percentage, but still, that means that 25% of Lyme patients are men, and you also have to consider that as she had already stated and explained, women are more likely to pursue healthcare options and deal with physical ailments. She had already written about how often women save men's lives by encouraging their husbands or relatives to go see a doctor, but she never evaluates how this would affect diagnostic statistics. Yes, there are lots of diseases that predominately affect women, but there are also men who are suffering without answers or help, or who feel pressured to be strong, not complain, and not seek help because of negative social messages that affect them.
Again, I think it's completely fine and good for this book to focus on women's health problems, but I wish that the author could have done so without making it sound like men don't also suffer from mysterious ailments, and like the ones who do aren't important. That really turned me off, and some of the things that she says come off as very mocking, like saying that if men were having all these issues, then there would be research and funding! Her smug tone and complete disregard for men who are suffering from the same types of autoimmune issues disgusted me.
After I gave up on this book, I read several other one-star or two-star reviews here on Goodreads and was amazed to learn how much worse it got. If I hadn't planned to read this since I first heard about it, and had seen recent reviews first, I never would have borrowed this from the library. However, since I did, I am adding my voice to the critical chorus, addressing the issues that I saw in the first thirty-five pages.
As someone who suffers from fibromyalgia (and suffers from shame of having to admit it) this book spoke to me on a deep level. Her story is horrifying. The pain and abuse she lived with at the hands of her health providers is appalling. The first 50% of the book is a memoir about her life with debilitating pain. Honestly when I got to the halfway point of the book, I was about to abandon it bc I just couldn’t handle reading one more near death setback, but then she changed course and started writing about her experience going into the depths of her personal hell and finding her feminine divinity. It is one of the most beautiful things I have read in a long time. You don’t need to have a mysterious illness to appreciate her discovery. She handles herself beautifully in this book and you truly feel like she is sitting down and having a discussion with you. If you have a mysterious illness and have felt ignored, mocked, belittled, diminished by your health care providers, both traditional and alternative, this book is for you. If you don’t but need some empowerment in your life, this book is for you as well.
This one hit a little too close to home, but also makes me count my blessings.