Khakpour instinctually insists that, yes, her illness needs to be named. At one point, Khakpour visits an acupuncturist who asks her, in reference to the mysterious disease: "Does it need a name?" (122). Sick makes readers feel the visceral frustration that Khakpour endures because of these many unknowns, but it also asks us to question the utility of diagnostic certainty. One doctor tells her "I don't really think there is anything wrong with you physically" (111). Doctors offer guesses: it could be black mold, Bipolar II, thyroiditis, or maybe polycystic ovary syndrome. Khakpour experiences painful symptoms, including chronic insomnia, panic attacks, rapid weight loss, tremors, and fainting, but neither she nor doctors know what causes them. But while other illness narratives, like Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals (1980) or Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face (1994), present little doubt that the illness in question is real, Sick doesn't provide much in the way of certainty. Thomas Couser explains in Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009), autobiographical writing by disabled authors frequently offers a "retort…to the traditional misrepresentation of disability in Western culture" (7). Sick proves that life writing continues to be a meaningful literary genre for chronically ill and disabled authors. Upon receiving it, Khakpour begins crying and asks the doctor to repeat himself – just in case she misheard.
It isn't until the last pages of the memoir that she is finally given a diagnosis. Readers of Sick follow Khakpour as she repeatedly seeks help from the medical establishment but comes up empty handed again and again. Published this year after much critical anticipation, Sick charts Khakpour's circuitous and at times maddening path to receiving a diagnosis of late-stage Lyme. She firmly believes that something is wrong with her body, but she is forced to question whether the symptoms she experiences are psychological, physical in nature, or something else altogether. Because of this lack of clinical, social, and cultural support, Khakpour experiences Lyme as a vast unknown. In Khakpour's words, the disease is seen as one "of hypochondriacs and alarmists and rich people who have the money and time to go chasing obscure diagnoses" (21).
As such, doctors frequently regard Lyme with skepticism. There is also no way to prove that one has been cured of the disease. "It is unlikely I will ever know when I contracted ," she writes, "just as it is unlikely I will ever be rid of it entirely" (3). In the opening pages of her memoir Sick (2018), Porochista Khakpour tells readers that even though she has lived with Lyme for most of her life, her knowledge of the disease is full of gaps.
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