Frank, thoughtful reflections that should resonate with the 47 percent of Americans reported to be living with chronic pain.
Meditative, intimate essays consider the experience of suffering.
At the age of 39, Huber (English/Fairfield Univ.; The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2016, etc.) was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, autoimmune diseases that cause severe joint pain, surges of fever, and often loss of mobility. In this collection of essays written during the past five years (some previously published), the author reflects on her struggle to reassess her identity and make sense of affliction from diseases that flare up unpredictably and uncontrollably. She is dismayed by physicians who prefer not to deal with incurable illness because they “have been trained in environments of competition where cures and successes are prized.” She rails against doctors who cynically assume that she is trying to elicit prescriptions for opioids and others who ask her to rate her pain on a scale from one to 10, a rubric that she deems inadequate for expressing and treating pain. More helpful, she has found, is the McGill Pain Questionnaire, which opens with the salient question: “What Does Your Pain Feel Like?” Well-meaning friends who suggested herbal medicines or exercise convinced Huber that the “massive gulf separating the pained from the non-pained can be summed up in one question: ‘Have you tried yoga?’ ” Pain infuses her life: cooking, sex, caring for her son, teaching, and writing—which sometimes, she admits, “has been my only relief.” Her voice as “pain woman,” she discovers, is different from her other writing voices. “She has a kind of messianic confidence that I do not have in my normal writing or even in my normal living,” she writes. “Pain woman” surely gives voice to the feistiest essays in this uneven collection. Although Huber strives for metaphors to express her pain, she does not always succeed, and probing her experiences sometimes results in claustrophobic repetition.
Frank, thoughtful reflections that should resonate with the 47 percent of Americans reported to be living with chronic pain.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9991-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Eight brief chronicles of medical detection by the late RouechÇ (Sea to Shining Sea, 1986, etc.), whose ``Annals of Medicine'' pieces in the New Yorker established him as a master of the genre. Readers familiar with RouechÇ's work will know just what to expect here and will not be disappointed. Patients' identities are concealed, but the doctors are identified, and RouechÇ's style of quoting them at length gives his accounts authenticity and immediacy. What's remarkable is the variety of cases he explores. In the title story, the puzzle to be solved is the sudden growth of breasts in a male patient in his 70s. Surprisingly, it is the patient's wife, not his doctor, who comes up with the solution. ``The Dinosaur Collection'' features a case of Munchausen's Syndrome (the faking of illness), the twist here being that the deception is perpetrated not by the patient but by his mother. ``Cinnabar'' and ``A Good Safe Tan'' deal with the known and unknown poisons in our midst. The first features an artist repairing an ancient tapestry, and the second, a young girl who consumes what she believes is a harmless vegetable dye in the hopes of acquiring a glorious tan. Vanity also comes into play in ``Hoping,'' in which a young woman's desire for slim thighs leads her to a hospital emergency room. A doctor working in a little-known specialty, the medical problems of musicians, is the chief sleuth in ``Overdoing It.'' ``The Poker Room'' is a classic RouechÇ detection piece involving an outbreak of Q fever, a long-running poker game, and a litter of kittens. The final piece, ``Hoofbeats of a Zebra,'' demonstrates that sometimes when one hears hoofbeats, it is not the common horse that should be expected, but the uncommon zebra, i.e., the rare disease. A great treat for fans of medical lore.
Pub Date: May 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93934-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
A moving personal narrative about a family confronting Huntington's disease, interwoven with a journalistic account of the biomedical research that found the gene responsible and may one day find the cure. In 1968, Wexler's mother was diagnosed with Huntington's disease, a devastating neurological illness that often leads to madness and is always fatal. Historian Wexler (Occidental College; Emma Goldman, 1984) then learned that she and her sister, Nancy, each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease from their mother. While Wexler's father organized the Hereditary Disease Foundation to support Huntington's research, and her sister became a researcher, Wexler felt shame over her failure to get as actively involved. She reports that her own diary, one ``obsessed with self-analysis,'' rarely mentioned Huntington's and then only in connection with her mother, never with herself. For years, the family watched Wexler's mother's progressive deterioration, and the daughters watched themselves for symptoms. A research breakthrough in 1983 led to a predictive test that could identify those who would develop the illness years before any symptoms appeared. In the most gripping part of the book, Wexler describes her feelings about living with uncertainty and her decision not to take the test. The research story, which makes up a large portion of the book, is less compelling than the personal one, but the account of fieldwork in a village in Venezuela where nearly every family has members with Huntington's is fascinating. Wexler is at her best when writing about human beings. At one point she speaks of her sister as having ``the insight of a woman at risk, who understands emotionally as well as intellectually the tremendous costs of this illness.'' The same may be said of Wexler. A revealing memoir that tells as much about living at risk as it does about Huntington's.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-1710-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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