Sick

Porochista Khakpour has been sick for as long as she can remember, and for most of those years nobody can tell her why. Trips to the ER, constant pain and exhaustion, and a steady anxiety leave her with one puzzle she cannot solve: how any single person can be this sick.

The answer arrives only after several drug addictions, three major hospitalizations and more than $100,000 in costs. Her diagnosis is late-stage Lyme disease. Getting it does not end the story, because she then has to accept the answer she spent her adult life looking for.

This is a memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis and addiction, written by a writer who lived all three. It is organized by place, with sections set in New York, LA, New Mexico and Germany, each a location that shifted the direction of her health and her life.

Khakpour reflects on what uncertainty does to the body and to the mind. She writes about her mental illness, her dependence on the benzodiazepines her psychiatrists prescribed, and a body that keeps getting worse. The book sits in the company of Brain on Fire and Darkness Visible, and it holds out the idea that full recovery may be a myth.