“How Can I Get Better?” by Dr. Richard Horowitz

How Can I Get Better? An Action Plan for Treating Resistant Lyme and Chronic Disease Richard Horowitz, MD Once you go down the rabbit hole of Lyme disease and everything that comes with it, you realize that most of mainstream medicine is some kind of crazy looking glass world (why yes, I DID just reference […]

“Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand In “Unbroken,” Laura Hillenbrand returns to tell another story (after “Seabiscuit”) of someone who has been bloodied by adversity, but not broken by it. Louie Zamperini was one of the world’s hottest track stars, breaking record after record and running in the 1936 Olympics. Then WWII broke out, and he ended up […]

“Unlocking Lyme” by William Rawls, MD

Unlocking Lyme William Rawls, MD I am reviewing this book somewhat prematurely, since I haven’t actually tried out most of the things in it yet. However, each person’s reaction to treatment is so individual that my success or failure probably won’t mean much either way. What is more of interest to me about this book […]

“Unrest” coming to Winston-Salem Today!

Unrest here at WFU! I’m very excited to say that Wake Forest University will be holding a screening of “Unrest” today at 6pm in Broyhill Auditorium, Farrell Hall. The screening will be free and open to the public, and there will be a panel discussion afterwards that will, health permitting, include me. I’ll probably discuss […]

“How To Be Sick” by Toni Bernhard

How To Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide For the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers Toni Bernhard Foreword by Sylvia Boorstein The problem for most Western approaches to dealing with a serious or chronic illness is that they are based, whether they know it or not, on the concepts of objective distance and physical and rational […]

My Essay on The Mighty: How Chronic Illness Taught me to Accept My Body

My latest essay on The Mighty, about finally learning to accept my body once I developed a serious chronic illness, can be found here (That’s a picture of Mandelstam, whose poem “A Body Has Been Given to Me” begins the essay. It’s not the most flattering picture of him, but it’s the bravest: it’s his mug […]

My Essay on Chronic Illness in “The Mighty”

So, when I’m not writing fiction or book reviews (or working), I’m being chronically ill. Actually, I’m chronically ill all the time now, and all that other stuff has to be worked around the illness issues. I recently had a piece come out in “The Mighty,” which I originally entitled “Why Students Need Sick Faculty,” […]

“Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer’s Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn’t Understand” by Julie Rehmeyer

I have a hard time reviewing this book objectively, since so much of it feels almost creepily like I’m reading about myself. The descriptions of the crawling horror of the illness that takes over Rehmeyer’s life are so painfully familiar that I had a hard time restraining myself from shouting out, “Ha! It’s not just […]

“Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide” by Erica Verrillo

Of the many problems with having CFS/ME/FMS, one of the more frustrating is the lack of treatments. Or rather, the overwhelming number of potential treatments, none of which are a sure-fire cure. Since the cause and mechanism of this illness/these illnesses (it is still a matter of debate whether Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and […]

In Which I Contemplate Day-to-Day Activities When You Feel Like Hell

I thought I’d take a break from book reviewing to meditate a little more on an issue of all-consuming interest for me–namely, my mysterious illness that may or may not be CFS/ME, an obscure strain of Lyme disease, babesiosis…the possibilities are vast and confusing, and your run-of-the-mill MD is left in a muddled quandary when faced […]