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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
been a few years since i read this one, but people talking shit about it in the reviews... ok.
as someone who's been chronically ill since childhood, this is the first book i read where i was like YES YOU GET IT!!! i haven't really been in community with other chronically ill people, it's been around so long for me, it's really mutable because of my current med. but it's nice to read someone else's reflections. and yes, she was messy in her past. it's clear that alongside health issues, there was some trauma - not going to go armchair psychology here. if i remember right, khakpour was diagnosed as a kid? had symptoms as a kid? and speaking from experience that bears a huge influence on your sense of self down the line even if it doesn't when you're sitting in a hospital bed at 6 waiting for a diagnosis.
is this much about the writing? no. but it's meaningful to show to complexities of living with illness in a medical system that doesn't work. especially in her case of lyme.
as someone who's been chronically ill since childhood, this is the first book i read where i was like YES YOU GET IT!!! i haven't really been in community with other chronically ill people, it's been around so long for me, it's really mutable because of my current med. but it's nice to read someone else's reflections. and yes, she was messy in her past. it's clear that alongside health issues, there was some trauma - not going to go armchair psychology here. if i remember right, khakpour was diagnosed as a kid? had symptoms as a kid? and speaking from experience that bears a huge influence on your sense of self down the line even if it doesn't when you're sitting in a hospital bed at 6 waiting for a diagnosis.
is this much about the writing? no. but it's meaningful to show to complexities of living with illness in a medical system that doesn't work. especially in her case of lyme.
dark
inspiring
mysterious
fast-paced
Such a disappointing and poorly written story of a very frustrating struggle through a hard to diagnose illness. I almost put it down as my first DNF book but stuck it out. Not really sure why.
I wish I remembered when or why I added this book to my To Read list. Did someone recommend it? Did I see the author on tv talking about it? I usually enjoy memoirs and anything medical so it makes sense it was in my list but I have no idea what the real reason is.
I ask that because I didn’t really enjoy reading it. It seemed very disjointed. She jumps all over in time. In fact I kind of feel like each chapter could have just been written as a short essay or magazine article or something and then she tried to put them altogether as a book without really editing it to flow together. At the end she does say she was sick the whole time she wrote this and that it didn’t end up being the book she sought to write when she first sold it. Lyme disease is known to have brain fog as a symptom as well as she had a long term concussion from a car accident so she easily could have just been mentally disjointed while writing it. Who knows.
So I believe the book is supposed to be about her journey through life, most of it being sick. From a child whose family fled Iran for California, growing up as a looked down upon foreigner, poorer than she felt she should be, never feeling at home in her body or in LA to moving to NY, becoming an addict, becoming a writer, dating many guys, most who are very well off, and later we learn she dated women too but didn’t want to focus on that, to traveling and moving to different locations like Leipzig, Germany, Lewisburg, PA (home of Bucknell University where she taught), to Santa Fe, NM. All the while she was sick. It impacted everything in her life. It seems like she never really knew what was wrong, a few times doctors told her she had Lyme but it isn’t really clear why she never treated it until around 2012 (I think) when she moves to Santa Fe for the second time. She finally gets it into remission and wants to go back to NY to write as she feels that is where her life is. That is when she gets in the car accident and it’s book over.
So after all this running around, with only having a little time in remission, she not only has severe problems from the concussion from the car accident she also has a Lyme relapse, but we don’t get to find out what happens next as the book ends and I guess her life goes on today without us knowing where or what or how she is doing. I mean it is called Sick, not Healed but I was still a bit letdown.
I ask that because I didn’t really enjoy reading it. It seemed very disjointed. She jumps all over in time. In fact I kind of feel like each chapter could have just been written as a short essay or magazine article or something and then she tried to put them altogether as a book without really editing it to flow together. At the end she does say she was sick the whole time she wrote this and that it didn’t end up being the book she sought to write when she first sold it. Lyme disease is known to have brain fog as a symptom as well as she had a long term concussion from a car accident so she easily could have just been mentally disjointed while writing it. Who knows.
So I believe the book is supposed to be about her journey through life, most of it being sick. From a child whose family fled Iran for California, growing up as a looked down upon foreigner, poorer than she felt she should be, never feeling at home in her body or in LA to moving to NY, becoming an addict, becoming a writer, dating many guys, most who are very well off, and later we learn she dated women too but didn’t want to focus on that, to traveling and moving to different locations like Leipzig, Germany, Lewisburg, PA (home of Bucknell University where she taught), to Santa Fe, NM. All the while she was sick. It impacted everything in her life. It seems like she never really knew what was wrong, a few times doctors told her she had Lyme but it isn’t really clear why she never treated it until around 2012 (I think) when she moves to Santa Fe for the second time. She finally gets it into remission and wants to go back to NY to write as she feels that is where her life is. That is when she gets in the car accident and it’s book over.
So after all this running around, with only having a little time in remission, she not only has severe problems from the concussion from the car accident she also has a Lyme relapse, but we don’t get to find out what happens next as the book ends and I guess her life goes on today without us knowing where or what or how she is doing. I mean it is called Sick, not Healed but I was still a bit letdown.
I wasn’t sure what to think before I started the book. I actually really enjoyed reading it. I think the author’s words in her epilogue sum up the book well: “Illness will always be with you as long as life is with you. And tragedy will be with you too.” It’s how you respond to the illness and tragedy that defines you. Things happen to us for reasons we don’t understand, and sadly, as Porochista says in one section of her book, “Women simply aren’t allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too, and then it is by some miracle or accident that the two can be separated for proper diagnosis.” This book is a reminder to care of yourself, even if you’re not suffering from chronic illness. Don’t just give up when all fails.
This book is as much about addiction, romantic relationships versus independence, and being believed/understood as it is about chronic illness. Incredibly compelling — somehow hopeful even when it feels hopeless, even when there is no end in sight. I couldn’t put it down.
Connected deeply with this one... a brilliant gal, left Iran as a kid during the war with Iraq, coming of age and wilding in NYC in the 90s, in love with reading and writing, yoga, traveling, altered states of consciousness, junk food, living in Germany for a month. Achieving tremendous accomplishments, all the while battling tides of mystery illness, medical gaslighting, hospitalizations, and the financial and relationship instability that come along with it. Some have critiqued it for being all over the place... I would hazard a guess that most of those reviewers have no lived experience of undiagnosed debilitating chronic illness. Maybe that's the point - welcome to real life with it.
"The days kept going on and on and I could only measure them in the moans of the dying man next door. If there was hell, this was it. My celebrity ward, the great glittery cedar Sinai in the heart of glamorous Los Angeles, the Jewel of the Golden State. This was where I was rotting. This was where I was fading away. In the end, only one doctor was somewhat sympathetic. A kind, gentle infectious disease specialist. He was interested in my lyme history. He watched my heart rate and read my file and told me if it did turn out to be lyme it would be what they call late stage lyme... "Not what you want", he said. "I don't want anything" I replied. He said he would check the lime titres, and I never saw him again. By the end of my time there, the doctors didn't like me and wanted me out. This was clear. I'd been too demanding, not listening to them, sticking to my story as if it was fake, wanting answers, asking for sleep and real food. None of the test results were adding up to anything. The nurses began to avoid my buzzes. The moans from the old man next door died out when he actually died halfway into my stay and my parents stopped visiting. The only diagnosis they came to was anxiety, plus a recommendation to get me off sleep medications and benzos, to be followed up with Dr. Bozotti and Dr. Frank. I found myself in exactly the same place I had started, except this visit cost over $80,000 and it was not certain what insurance would cover. Back at my parents condo, I was more alone than ever".
"The days kept going on and on and I could only measure them in the moans of the dying man next door. If there was hell, this was it. My celebrity ward, the great glittery cedar Sinai in the heart of glamorous Los Angeles, the Jewel of the Golden State. This was where I was rotting. This was where I was fading away. In the end, only one doctor was somewhat sympathetic. A kind, gentle infectious disease specialist. He was interested in my lyme history. He watched my heart rate and read my file and told me if it did turn out to be lyme it would be what they call late stage lyme... "Not what you want", he said. "I don't want anything" I replied. He said he would check the lime titres, and I never saw him again. By the end of my time there, the doctors didn't like me and wanted me out. This was clear. I'd been too demanding, not listening to them, sticking to my story as if it was fake, wanting answers, asking for sleep and real food. None of the test results were adding up to anything. The nurses began to avoid my buzzes. The moans from the old man next door died out when he actually died halfway into my stay and my parents stopped visiting. The only diagnosis they came to was anxiety, plus a recommendation to get me off sleep medications and benzos, to be followed up with Dr. Bozotti and Dr. Frank. I found myself in exactly the same place I had started, except this visit cost over $80,000 and it was not certain what insurance would cover. Back at my parents condo, I was more alone than ever".
I found this book fascinating, frustrating, beautiful, and unbelievable. The author shows so many facets of living with a chronic illness while owning her own unreliability and lack of clarity. While I was tempted at times to put the book down, I always found the writing too captivating to abandon.
Wow, this memoir was intense and terrifying. I received a Lyme diagnosis last year, but then it turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Half the time I was reading this I second guessed the "misdiagnosis" thing... maybe it was a mistake, maybe this could be me someday... I felt deeply for the author and am so grateful for my health.
I enjoyed this book without loving it – Porochista's fragmented approach to chronicling her illness oscillating between different settings and times in her life resulted in a jumbled read, and it was highly repetitive towards the end. I failed to keep track of her different lovers and the ways they kept re-entering and exiting her life, the many different diagnoses she'd received, and the numerous people who jumped in and out of her life. The thing I enjoyed the most was reading more about how her sense of displacement from being a refugee was mirrored in the way she felt displaced in her own body.