Sick: A Memoir

I ordered this a long time ago and finally was able to finish it (thanks Lyme brain). This is a must read if you or someone you love has Lyme disease. It is such an underrated disease that deserves way more understanding, compassion,support and education. This book definitely highlights some of the less talked about symptoms/experiences of LD/coinfections. Being chronically ill is hard enough, but it's a million times worse when noone believes you- especially the people who are the key to your health recovery.I am incredibly grateful for Porochistas bravery and honesty in sharing her journey. Thank you for helping some of us feel heard, believed and less alone.

A third of the way into this I couldn’t help but feel nothing but sadness at this attempt to convey the life of someone living with chronic illness. This just screams of a self-indulgent lifestyle, health taken for granted (the shocking abuse the writer puts her own body through is absolutely alien to me as a person who has lived with multiple chronic health conditions!) and an obsession with self. There wasn’t anything I could relate to in here, apart from the long and fraught road to any form of correct diagnosis. The stuff in between is rather irrelevant.

I eagerly read this book in a couple days when I received it. I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot from reading it. Khakpour wrote so honestly and bravely about her journey with her illness. However, I felt frustrated after finishing the book. Certainly my own emotions related to my own journey with Lyme lead to this frustration. I don't mind that the author jumped around time frames and settings while telling her story. I appreciate that she did not wrap up the story with a neat little bow, saying she was healed and a better person for having the illness. I appreciate that she was young when she began experiencing illness and that she also battled with emotional trauma from her childhood and some limits in financial resources and family support. I enjoyed hearing about the different settings in which she lived and the experience of being an immigrant and how that affected her against the backdrop of current events such as the Paris attacks. However, I would have enjoyed hearing less about her romantic relationships during her illness. I felt this especially when she finally confirms her diagnosis and finds successful treatment. She almost glazes over that period quickly and does not give the same kind of time and attention to that experience as she does to the parts about being sick. Most frustrating, I feel like the author never really owned her part in her own healing. She admits that she is not a good, compliant patient and I can understand that, but I feel she looked outside herself so much for the healing of her body. This is not meant as a judgement, but rather an observation. We all know that we can become attached to the labels that we assign ourselves or that others assign to us, and I see that in this book. Of course the book IS called "SICK", so I guess I should have expected as much. Still recommend the book and appreciate the author for what she has shared!

Well written and absorbing...but should have been titled Sick (in the Head). Khapour is a crackpot. Medical Science deems Lyme Disease legitimate and Chronic Lyme Disease "fake". Well, this book will be cited as evidence that the latter is the case. About one-third of the way through the book, I thought the author was a sick woman who happened to be prone to dramatics; two-thirds of the way through the book, I thought she was a raging hypochondriac; by the end of the book, I had concluded she has the most severe form of borderline personality disorder. That she has had a seemingly endless stream of boyfriends and lovers is evidence that men are drawn to vulnerable women...or total wack-jobs, depending on how you look at it. Her need for attention is insatiable. By the end of the book, I had trouble believing there was ANYTHING physically wrong with her. There's one scene in the book when she and her father take her mother out to lunch on Mother's Day and she (the author) just happens to get sick at the restaurant. If I had been her father, I'd have turned the pitcher of ice water over her head.

I didn't get past the first chapter as I found the writer too repetitively self pitying. Another purchase for the charity shop!