Quotes from Meghan O'Rourke

autoimmune diseases are one third genetic and two thirds environmental

one scholar puts it, "if a physician cannot identify the cause of a disease, it means that it is procured by the Devil.

Waking Early Sunday Morning," I sat "like a dragon on/time's hoard.

But if your immune system isn't great, and fails to monitor it, P. gingivalis starts to produce biofilm-signaling molecules, and neighboring organisms are like, wait, we can join a biofilm?" (Biofilms are slimy structures inside of which bacteria live in an organized community and communicate with one another; the spongy molecular matrix that contains them helps protect them from the immune system's attacks.) And soon you've got a mouth full of cavities.

In 2019, a study of patients at a clinic in Iran found that "laughter yoga"—gentle yoga that includes laughing—was more effective than anti-anxiety medication in controlling symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, which are worsened by stress.

I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: "gradually and then suddenly.

You cannot muscle your way to health when you are chronically ill. Rather, one way of coming to terms with an amorphous systemic disease is recognizing that you are sick, that the illness will come and go, and that it is not the kind of illness you can conquer.

Their fierce response was a classic example of what is known as the "Semmelweis reflex"—the reflexive rejection of new paradigms in medicine

My experience of being ill led me to see that our bodies may feel autonomous, but we all live in the nexus of radical interconnection. Our bodies are always in communication with other bodies: our immune system is responsive not only to collective health policies but also to the emotions and affects of others.

Furthermore, in some people the bacterial infection went on to cause stomach cancer—

felt a prickle at the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized—your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a preexisting pattern.

But medicine has not simply neglected to research women's health; it has also failed to treat women who are sick. One study found that women in various ERs were 13 to 25 percent less likely to receive opioid painkillers (the strongest painkiller medicine has) than men were.

But the balance of power is still tilted in favor of the doctor. When a patient tries to talk to a rushed doctor, wanting both assistance and agency, the conversation is often fraught on both sides.

Alphonse Daudet observes in In the Land of Pain. "Everyone will get used to it except me.

Tolstoy said about Ivan Ilyich: "What he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it.

One does not have to be Christian to see that [John] Donne was right. To be ill is to recognize this interconnectedness -- to understand how much we are "a part of the main." But to be ill in America today is to be brought up against the pathology of a culture that denies this fact. In the worst moments of my illness, I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than the community, must do all the healing.

As Virginia Woolf testified in On Being Ill, "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

As the surgeon Atul Gawande wrote of the medical profession, "Nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve.

So challenging was living with an unidentified illness that she welcomed the terrible news with what sounds like excitement.

could imagine what it was like to give up, to feel your mind go as wobbly as your body, reconciling yourself to the idea that death would really be a relief—a respite from lonely suffering.

I can say is that it was a bone-deep, a cell-deep conviction: that whatever was wrong was not in my head. The symptoms—roving neurological pain, headaches, flu-like aches, sensitivity to food—were too specific. And my lab work had so many small clues. Low vitamin D. Anemia. The many viruses.

And it was never easy to get an appointment with a new specialist: each time I saw a doctor who suggested I see a different specialist, I had to resign myself to waiting four to six weeks.

During these months, I calculated, I spent a day and a half per month just moving paper and electronic records from doctor to doctor. I spent an additional three days traveling to doctors' appointments, during which I often waited for an hour or more to be seen for ten minutes. (Or fifteen, when my doctor had time.) Putting it all together, I realized that each month I was losing close to five out of twenty workdays—nearly a quarter of my work time. The

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.