THE DEEP PLACES

The New York Times columnist chronicles his mysterious ordeal with Lyme disease.

As Douthat chronicles in brisk detail, what began innocently enough with inchoate bodily aches and pains quickly intensified into “a pan-fry sizzle on my hips, a throbbing at the very front of my skull, an intolerable vibration inside my ankles.” When blood tests and body scans were inconclusive, stress was identified as the probable culprit. When the discomfort worsened, additional evaluations were sought, including a recommended evaluation by a psychiatrist, “my eleventh doctor in ten weeks,” who “told me that in his experience the kind of physical symptoms I was experiencing had to have some real physiological root, some cause beyond stress or psychosomatic collapse.” Exasperated with the unknowns, Douthat became overwhelmed while in the process of relocating back to New England with his family. The bizarre set of medical maladies and their inexplicable causes lends the narrative a surprising amount of suspense and literary tension. Desperate and aggravated after another misdiagnosis of fibromyalgia, the author began self-experimenting with an “insane regimen of drugs,” including antibiotics and a host of unorthodox herbal remedies, all of which proved only marginally effective. In educative chapters that describe the speculated origins and chronology of the resilient disease, Douthat maps out just how elusive accurate treatment can become and how the road to a definitive diagnosis can drag on through years of antibiotic trials. Consistently candid and often harrowing, Douthat’s eloquent prose injects shimmers of possibility into the seemingly hopeless situation he was forced to endure. As with many Lyme disease accounts, there is no happy ending nor a resounding diagnosis and effective treatment eradicating it from the lives of sufferers. The author’s persistence in conquering Lyme disease’s “impenetrable-seeming wall of opposition and denial” bleeds across each page. Douthat’s explorations of bioweaponized theories for Lyme’s origins are unconvincing, but they don’t ruin the impact of his message.

A palpable patient experience of a pervasive disease that continues to confound medical science.