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Sick audiobook

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Sick Audiobook Summary

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In the tradition of Brain on Fire and Darkness Visible, an honest, beautifully rendered memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery that details author Porochista Khakpour’s struggles with late-stage Lyme disease.

For as long as writer Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn’t know why. All of her trips to the ER and her daily anguish, pain, and lethargy only ever resulted in one question: How could any one person be this sick? Several drug addictions, three major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease.

Sick is Khakpour’s arduous, emotional journey–as a woman, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems–through the chronic illness that perpetually left her a victim of anxiety, living a life stymied by an unknown condition.

Divided by settings, Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course–New York, LA, New Mexico, and Germany–as she meditates on both the physical and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life. With candor and grace, she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness, her addiction to the benzodiazepines prescribed by her psychiatrists, and her ever-deteriorating physical health.

A story about survival, pain, and transformation, Sick is a candid, illuminating narrative of hope and uncertainty, boldly examining the deep impact of illness on one woman’s life.

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Sick Audiobook Narrator

Yetta Gottesman is the narrator of Sick audiobook that was written by Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel The Last Illusion was a 2014 “Best Book of the Year” according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more.  Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, SlateSalon, and Bookforum, among many others. Currently, she is guest faculty at VCFA and Stonecoast’s MFA programs as well as Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review. Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City’s Harlem.

About the Author(s) of Sick

Porochista Khakpour is the author of Sick

More From the Same

Sick Full Details

Narrator Yetta Gottesman
Length 7 hours 38 minutes
Author Porochista Khakpour
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date July 10, 2018
ISBN 9780062880277

Subjects

The publisher of the Sick is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Diseases, General, HEALTH & FITNESS

Additional info

The publisher of the Sick is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062880277.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Susannah

February 06, 2018

“I sometimes wonder if I would have been less sick if I had a home.”

Marcy

June 11, 2018

I have fascinated with Porochista Khakpour for years. It was so wonderful to actually meet the real Porochista in real life and sort of fall in love with the actual person. Reading her memoir, SICK, was a fascinating entry into the actual life woman behind the tweets -- so much of the stories in this book was already familiar in a strange way -- and FB posts and the essays and novels. It felt almost like a privilege, to read her actual story. I am in awe of how honest this book is. And well crafted, jumping through time and place. The sentences. The scene of her car crash coming home from class late one night read like a thriller. This memoir also me angry at so many doctors who caused so much more unnecessary pain. This whole book is page turner, and I read it over the course of a weekend. I even found myself feeling sick on the final day of reading Sick, curled up in bed with her book, almost an act of solidarity.

Katharine

August 07, 2018

For obvious reasons, I tend to be drawn toward books about people living with chronic illness—particularly women. I was especially eager to read Sick, Khakpour's memoir, because I know a number of people affected by Lyme disease. Khakpour's story is a difficult one, full of not just a lifetime of illness, but a lifetime of struggle. At times I had to put it down and step away -- it can be difficult to read someone's story of illness when you live with an illness yourself. While I didn't relate to her story as much as I'd hoped, I found it fascinating, informative, and painful. Hers is a story that is needed in our society, for many reasons. We have a tendency not to believe women's physical pain, and Lyme disease seems to be an illness our country has a difficult time understanding. I hope that the more stories like Khakpour's that are heard, the more we'll start really listening to both women with chronic illness and those who live with Lyme disease. (Thank you to Harper Perennial for gifting me this copy in exchange for an honest review.)

Emily

May 30, 2018

This is a difficult, frustrating read -- an an immensely brave one. I applaud Porochista's honesty and openness about her battle with Lyme disease and the horrific chain of events that has followed the onset of her illness. It is infuriating, but sadly not surprising, to see all of the ways she has been mistreated and misdiagnosed by the myriad medical professionals she has seen throughout her life. For anyone who struggles with constant, undiagnosed pain, for anyone who doesn't understand what it means to be a woman in pain in this world, for anyone who knows someone with a chronic illness but doesn't quite know what it means--this book is for you.

Nasim

September 08, 2018

I found Sick hard to put down, I loved Khakpour's style - sophisticated, measured writing that is easy to read. An image early on of a car crash lodged in my head: 'There were no lights. After some time I turned on my hazards and looked into the rearview mirror and watched more cars speed by, each seeming faster than the one before. Everything seemed black and gold, confusing, elaborate, deadly and strangely a little bit beautiful.'And she can be very funny, unconsciously so: 'I had first met the young attorney Joseph for dinner at a local seafood restaurant and ordered what I did not want to eat at all: a whole fish. Nothing else on the menu had made any sense to me and somehow it had occurred to me that it might be nice to stare down at a beautiful thing like a fish .'I found the shifting geographical locations and descriptions of relationships compelling. I did not mind the lack of 'chronology' that has thrown some other readers. Illness is not easily captured in a narrative arc - illness is often messy and incoherent, especially illness that is challenging to diagnose. Illness does not follow a neat straight line. The number of (expensive) doctors Khakpour has to consult to have her Lyme confirmed is dizzying, but having a poorly understood, under-researched illness - as chronic Lyme is - makes patients extremely vulnerable to non-believing, often arrogant medics. Khakpour also has had addiction/psychiatric issues, which make her at times question her symptoms herself as being in her head, even though she knows deep down there is something physically very wrong.The narrator - I say narrator, although Sick is a memoir, memoir is still a construct - is not always likeable - who amongst us is? - but I appreciated this layer of honesty. Ill/disabled people can be as flawed as everyone else, we are not saints and should not be presented as such.Halfway through, the narrative tends to become a little repetitive, anaesthetising even, enlivened consistently though by minor and colourful characters scattered throughout. There is a lot of 'telling' - this happened and then that happened, which has the effect of Khakpour seeming almost detached from her suffering, and it occurred to me this might be a deliberate mechanism, though it left me wanting a little more 'dimension' at times.Khakpour vividly demonstrates that one can be both psychiatrically *and* physically ill, though her chronic, late stage Lyme diagnosis is contested throughout. I did not know very much about Lyme except that people with Lyme are sometimes misdiagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) - my own chronic illness. ME is another poorly understood, devastating physical illness where patients have faced great disbelief and abuse.I very much recommend Sick - Khakpour is a thoroughly engaging storyteller and I was very moved by her trying to hang on to her identity as writer and teacher as her illness 'erased' her. I wish her the best in her improvement/recovery.

Samantha

August 10, 2018

Okay edit on this because I was so high while I wrote the first one some parts don’t even make sense. The first 80% of the book is Porochita’s life in her teenage years until her thirties. She dates, drinks, and does a lot of drugs (medicinal and not). She doesn’t ever feel quite right. She’s always sick. A doctor mentioned Lyme disease once but never pursued it and neither did she.It goes from her being sick to better multiple times. Finally, she meets some friends that insist she needed to get help. The last 40 pages were 5 star for me, you just have to get there.“The book I sold wrote it’s own ending, insisted it’s own ending. It reminded me that illness will always be with you, as long as life is with you. Tragedy will be too.”

E.P.

June 09, 2018

Porochista Khakpour has always been sick. But why?Her story will be familiar to anyone who knows the standard Lyme narrative: years of mysterious ailments, frequent diagnoses of mental health problems, the treatment of which only made her problems worse, the growing worry that she was either crazy or dying or both, the elation at having a diagnosis of Lyme disease, the struggle to actually find a treatment that would work, the relapses, and so on and so forth.There are a couple of things that make "Sick" stand out from the general run of Lyme memoirs, although I'm of the opinion that one can hardly read too many Lyme memoirs, perhaps because I have a superstitious belief that if I just pore over the texts carefully and intentionally enough, I myself will be magically healed. But anyway. "Sick" stands out first of all because Khakpour was a writer before she was a Lyme patient, and she brings a writer's sensibility to the text, which is organized in a "writerly" way. For readers looking for a straightforward narrative of A then B then C, this may be a trifle disconcerting, and even for some "ordinary" literary readers the jumbled, surreal nature of sections of the book has been a bit of a shock. I guess you have to have Lyme disease or some other reality-altering condition for the perceptions that Khakpour describes to seem normal.Second of all, Khakpour combines her Lyme experience with her experience as an Iranian immigrant to the US, as an academic and a writer, and a person with a on-again-off-again drug problem and recurring relationship issues. All of these things meld together to create an experience that is both alienating from the average American experience, and quintessentially American: what could be more American than the Lyme-disease-ridden immigrant woman who constantly fears racism while frequently passing as a member of the white majority, who spends years (and loads of money) getting ineffectual treatment for mental health and drug problems while her worst medical problems are deliberately denied, and who is a glorious melting pot of self-aware intersectional privilege and discrimination?Khakpour also delves deeply into the world of mental illness and addiction, where she and her doctors all thought for years that she solely belonged. She describes deliberately addicting herself to cigarettes her first week at college, all the drug-laced parties and events she participated in as a student, and then, particularly disturbingly, her descent into prescription drug addiction, fueled by medical professionals who kept pushing antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and sleeping pills on her as the solution to her problems. She gets clean, gets diagnosed with Lyme disease...and then slides back down the rabbit hole during a relapse in which no one considers that her insomnia, panic attacks, and weird hearing and vision problems might be the result of a spirochete infection *she had already been diagnosed with*, not...whatever else they thought might be causing it."Sick" highlights many of the problems Lyme patients face in getting diagnosis and treatment. Aside from the lack of training at medical school and the inadequacy of the current tests, Lyme patients are often their own worst enemies, even if unintentionally. As the spirochetes attack your body and especially your brain, you can develop horrendous insomnia, anxiety, and panic attacks (after all, a fearsome predator *is* eating you alive, and your body on some level knows this), confused perceptions, a sense of alienation from your body (which has, after all, been hijacked by the above-mentioned fearsome predator), addictions to the drugs used to combat the pain and fear that's debilitating you, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, you "look fine," and most testing shows nothing alarming. So it looks to the outside world like you're crazy, and maybe addicted to drugs, and you you may sort of be so.Khakpour also admits that she's a "bad sick girl," as she puts it. She's never embraced the strict diets many Lyme doctors endorse, and even still sneaks a smoke from time to time. So is her sickness the result of a life full of trauma and difficulty; her bohemian, artistic personality; her experimentations with drugs of all stripes; or her Lyme disease, which she's never quite sure when and where she picked up (she provides multiple possible infection moments, and maybe she *was* infected multiple times)? Or all of the above?If it makes anything clear, "Sick" suggests that it's D, all of the above, but that a huge problem is Lyme disease and the way it's treated. The sections on Khakpour's dealings with the depression-industrial complex, as I call it, are terrifying, as the doctors she goes to for help do nothing but re-addict her to the drugs she'd already had to get clean from once, and which she actively doesn't want to take again, but does anyway because it's the only salvation that's offered and she doesn't want to be labeled any more "noncompliant" a patient than she already has been."Sick" ends on an only partially hopeful note, as Khakpour relapses while writing the book, something that she chronicles as part of the story. This is not so much a story of triumph as it is a story of tenacity in the face of obstacle after obstacle, some of them self-created. Still, it's a gripping story of one woman's battle with one of the most fearsome and misunderstood medical monsters of our time.

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