The problem is that this combination of symptoms can suggest any number of other conditions. These can include facial palsy, insomnia, depression, chronic pain, mental fogginess, impaired motor function, mood changes, and general feelings of unwellness. It initially presents only with fever, headache, and fatigue, but if the infection goes undetected and untreated, other conditions arise. The bacterial infection is spread by the eastern or western blacklegged tick. One of her doctors has guessed that she was infected sometime between 20, though her medical history suggests she may have been infected much earlier. As Khakpour, A&S '02 (MA), notes in her new book, Sick: A Memoir (Harper Perennial), less than 10 percent of estimated Lyme cases have been confirmed by the CDC-recommended two-step testing process.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 300,000 are infected by Lyme each year it's the fastest growing, vectorborne infectious disease in the country. She needed to make sure it was, well, beating as it should. As somebody living with late-stage Lyme disease, she is a reluctant ER veteran, aware of when, and why, she needs to seek medical assistance.

Join or login below to continue reading.In early April, novelist Porochista Khakpour was sitting in a New York City emergency room. “None of the doctors spoke to each other, specialists were piled on top of specialists, each tugging and turning me in their own directions,” she bemoans………. “My full-time job became my health,” Khakpour writes. Khakpour was forced to be her own medical advocate in the search for a diagnosis, while she also focused on her writing and search for teaching jobs. The underlying theme of her frustrating, sad, and maddening journey was not just the inability of medical practitioners to diagnose her Lyme disease and communicate with each other, but that doctors believed it to be in her mind simply because of her gender. Khakpour provides evidence that women suffer most from Lyme disease and other autoimmune illnesses like my own, multiple sclerosis. The reality is that women like Khakpour with mysterious physical illnesses spend years in torment before confirmation of a diagnosis. In Sick, Khakpour spotlights America’s diseased healthcare system, and in particular how it infects the most vulnerable: immigrants citizens of different races, nationalities, and religions and women, specifically those living with a disabling chronic illness.

P orochista Khakpour’s insightful and haunting narrative of her battle with incurable late-stage Lyme disease is more than a memoir of her own illness.

Sick porochista