P orochista Khakpour’s insightful and haunting narrative of her battle with incurable late-stage Lyme disease is more than a memoir of her own illness.
In Sick, Khakpour spotlights America’s diseased healthcare system, and in particular how it infects the most vulnerable: immigrants; citizens of different races, nationalities, and religions; and women, specifically those living with a disabling chronic illness.
Khakpour provides evidence that women suffer most from Lyme disease and other autoimmune illnesses like my own, multiple sclerosis. The reality is that women like Khakpour with mysterious physical illnesses spend years in torment before confirmation of a diagnosis.
The underlying theme of her frustrating, sad, and maddening journey was not just the inability of medical practitioners to diagnose her Lyme disease and communicate with each other, but that doctors believed it to be in her mind simply because of her gender.
Khakpour was forced to be her own medical advocate in the search for a diagnosis, while she also focused on her writing and search for teaching jobs.
“My full-time job became my health,” Khakpour writes. “None of the doctors spoke to each other, specialists were piled on top of specialists, each tugging and turning me in their own directions,” she bemoans………. Join or login below to continue reading.
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