Medical Memoirs Books Showing 1-50 of 240 Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Paperback). Atul Gawande (shelved 6 times as medical-memoirs). This medical memoir is all about cancer, and in particular, how we have lost the war against it. In this book, Raza attacks the concept from every different angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. She even talks about the unbearable role of being her.

Title:The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

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Author:Sarah Ramey
Source:from publisher for review
Links:Bookshop (affiliate link) |Goodreads
Rating:

Summary: This was a mix of beautiful/entertaining prose and clear explanations, as enjoyable as it was informative.

This memoir of author Sarah Ramey’s experience with a ‘mysterious illness’ describes her many infuriating and unhelpful encounters with both doctors and alternative medicine practitioners. The callous response she receives from doctors, who regularly disregard clear physical evidence she’s sick and suggest a psychological explanation, was horrifying. Unfortunately, it isn’t a rare experience. Especially among women, complex diseases of the immune system are on the rise. Many of the women who experience these ‘mysterious illnesses’ encounter the same disbelief from medical practitioners and friends. In this memoir, Ramey’s personal experience therefore provides the reader with insight into a common but rarely discussed experience. She also suggests some helpful approaches to dealing with these illnesses and for contextualizing them that will likely be of use to other people, or those related to other people, experiencing similar health issues.

This was an incredibly well written book and I have almost exclusively positive things to say about it. That said, I’m going to get my one complaint out of the way first… Mac cosmetics storemac cosmetics outlet uk.

The author struck me as overly obsessed with stereotypical notions of gender. While she does, briefly, acknowledge that differences between men and women might be biological or social; that nonbinary people exist; and that she’s talking about stereotypically feminine and masculine traits; these points didn’t receive the emphasis they deserved. She never mentions trans people, which feels like an oversight. I agreed with a number of her points, such as the need to acknowledge that those of us identified female at birth are physically different in some ways from those identified male (immune system, etc). I certainly believe that these illnesses have been given less attention and confused for psychological problems because they primarily afflict women. I’m glad she made these points. I also have a lot of empathy for her desire to fit her suffering into a meaningful narrative, as in her extensive discussion of “the heroine’s journey”. However, I think the topic of gender could have been handled more sensitively and accurately. I also think her emphasis on gender might alienate men who share this suite of symptoms – whose existence she totally ignores until well into the book. Last but not least, her focus on the demonization of stereotypically female traits and the busy modern world (ie technology) really lets economic stressors off the hook. I suspect wage stagnation is a much bigger modern stressor than twitter, for example!

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That aside, I thought this book was very good. The author immediately hooked me with her often humorous take on this painful topic. She tells her story in an engaging way, taking the reader along with her through many false or incomplete epiphanies followed by difficult relapses. She includes enough vivid details that we can see the infuriating reality of how the medical system treats her. Likewise, her symptoms are described in enough detail to expose the misery of what she’s going through. The amount of detail didn’t ever feel gratuitous. In fact, I think the author probably spared us more of her suffering than she had to. By showing how overwhelming her illness was and how poorly the medical system reacted, she made it possible to understand why people would turn to alternative medicine – even for an extreme skeptic, like me! Humor, pop culture references, and her optimistic personality made this a pleasure to read, despite infuriating or depressing turns in her story.

The structure of the book was also extremely effective. Frequent section breaks gave the book a rapid, gripping pace, despite its length. At times, the breaks also gave the text a fragmented nature that felt like a reflection of the confusion and brain fog the author was experiencing. The shape of the text told the author’s story in other ways as well. When she’s spiraling into this world of no diagnosis, the text becomes stairs leading down. As she’s trying to restore order to her life. the text takes the shape of a list. Her blending of academic ideas with pop culture and thoughtful writing made this feel literary and intellectual. The explanations of complex concepts in health and in medicine were beautifully clear. The way she presented her recommendations, as a framework for action and with caveats that what works for her won’t work for everyone, felt like a responsible way to provide people with helpful advice, without making grandiose promises.

Despite my one complaint with this one, I thought it was incredibly well written, an enjoyable read, and full of information that will be valuable to both those who don’t know about people suffering from ‘mysterious illnesses’ and those who are too familiar with the phenomenon. Well deserving of the hype it’s received and one that I’m happy to recommend.

I’m off to The Healing Art of Writing Workshop at Dominican University in San Rafael, California, a city in Marin County just north of San Francisco. I am hoping to make some strong connections with other writers and healers, affirm my dedication to writing, revel in the company of writers and artists who are devoted to or interested in the field of medical humanities, and learn new techniques and strategies for expressing oneself with clarity and power.

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For the first time, I have submitted writing to the workshop that does not have to do with my memoir manuscript about infant surgery, The Autobiography of a Sea Creature. I wrote a brand new piece to share titled “My Mother’s Ears” about my mother’s hearing loss and the effect it had on me growing up. My mother’s hearing was damaged after undergoing a surgery at age twenty-five in which she had chosen to try an experimental anesthetic rather than suffer the debilitating effects of ether.

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I had heard many times about how her hearing loss occurred, how the resulting tinnitus affected her, and how my mother attempted to rectify the problem early on. Tinnitus, according to Merriam-Websteronline, is “a sensation of noise (as a ringing or roaring) that is caused by a bodily condition (as a disturbance of the auditory nerve or wax in the ear) and typically is of the subjective form which can only be heard by the one affected.” The condition sounds rather benign in this definition but the ringing in my mother’s ears was so severe that she could not hear the outside world without hearing aids.

Growing up, my mother told the story of her hearing loss over and over in the same way each time. Similarly, she had a particular way of telling and retelling my pyloric stenosis story–the same time-worn phrases again and again. Repeating a story of trauma is one of the clues in identifying a person who may be suffering from PTSD. When we hear ourselves and/or others telling a story over and over in the same tone and with the same words, something is stuck or frozen. The person needs a little kickstart to begin the journey of healing from whatever wounded him or her.

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I am only now discovering what it means to live a normal life, that is, one in which post-traumatic stress does not dominate. In a way, I’ve been reborn. I still have symptoms but I recognize them quickly and work with them in order to free myself from repetitive or stuck patterns of thinking and behavior. Just this morning in my meditation, I found myself frozen in a breathing pattern that I probably learned as a three-week old coping with acute pain after a stomach operation. My face above my nose is numb and my upper body completely rigid. This strategy enabled me to deal with a difficult situation as a baby but now when the pain and danger are no longer present, it is disturbing and limiting.

John Fox’s poetry workshops might help me out. Each morning at the workshop, I’ll be sitting in a circle of writers, listening to and discussing published poems and then writing and sharing poems of our own. Perhaps I’ll take this PTSD symptom on, the latest one calling for resolution. Writing a poem about my frozen head and shallow breath might free me up. In the meantime, here’s an affirmation I’ll try: I breathe naturally and fully, energizing my entire body. Breath awakens. Breath is my friend