5/18/2023 0 Comments Sick porochistaBut there’s something I’ve held on to, that I’ve heard from more than one doctor: the link between chronic illness and PTSD. It would drive me crazy, as if it were all guesswork, and I’ve found that I’ve never completely abandoned doubting it. Usually they would land on this idea: The truth is we know very little about this illness. In recent years I’ve had many discussions with various doctors about Lyme and have seen how their opinions and protocols would shift. The question of where would be the most mysterious of all. It wasn’t Iran, but then was it California, was it New York, was it Pennsylvania, was it…where? I would be destined never to find the bite on the location of my body, just as I’d be destined never to know the location I was in when bit by the tick. One could imagine the variations in physical location are what, in some ways, got me to illness-and Lyme disease-in the first place. I wondered why setting would feel so foreign to me, when location changes have been more than simple set switches for me. In telling this story, it occurred to me that it wasn’t character or plot or even theme that was the ruling principle of its composition, but something far less likely: setting. Ahead she shares an excerpt from her newest book, Sick: A Memoir, out today, about her journey battling mental illness caused by an undiagnosed chronic disease. Porochista Khakpour is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and writer.
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