Carrie Poppy Mar 09, 2020

liked it 's review

** spoiler alert ** It’s hard to summarize Sick as one thing. As an exercise in beautiful writing, it is a five star book. As a memoir, it is profound and selective, escaping all those traps of a person telling her own story (none of the usual weight of narratives that mean much to the teller and little to the listener). But for better or worse, Sick carries another burden: it is a book about illness, and in particular an illness that is often over-diagnosed and misunderstood. The author believes she has “chronic Lyme” or “late stage Lyme,” diagnoses which are highly controversial to the medical community, and she acknowledges as much. Throughout her harrowing adventure we join her at emergency rooms and doctors offices where they often tell her the same things: that at least some of her illness is psychological, that she does have a skin condition that would explain many of her symptoms, and that it would be wise for her to get proper care through a mental health facility. For the most part, this advice is waved off as Not Quite Right, not fulfilling some basic intuition never quite articulated. One gets the impression that the writer equates “psychological illness” with “crazy,” something she is clearly not. At some turns this advice is heeded, albeit briefly, but usually as a form of payment to earn the right to what comes next: infinitely more time and money spent in the alternative health field, receiving unproven and even harmful treatments like injectable ozone therapy. Toward the end, as she becomes completely enveloped in the alt-med world, she even goes to work for Gary Null, who she passes off as an eccentric but brilliant maverick of medicine. You’d be forgiven for not knowing the name, and the author isn’t going to give you the proper context: that he is an AIDS denialist who thinks HIV doesn’t exist, and who has likely caused untold thousands of deaths with his crackpot theories. My work brings me into close quarters with these same sorts of claims, and without a running mental roladex of these obscure names and treatments, they would have gone completely undetected. She is such a gifted writer, such a lucid voice, it is difficult to believe she is espousing such dangerous and unfounded nonsense. But here we are. As I followed her down the dark tunnel of her story, I found myself losing my grip on her. She becomes your friend in these pages, and as she slips further and more defiantly into the grip of fake medicine, she paints a picture of a brighter future. But all I saw was a friend slipping, going, gone.