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Brilliant account of the fall into chronic illness — Sarah Perry in the Guardian

sarah darwins

Senior Member
Messages
2,508
Location
Cornwall, UK
Last Saturday the Guardian carried a guest piece by the emerging young writer Sarah Perry that really shouldn't be missed.

She became ill a few years ago with what turned out to be Grave's disease. She is now comparatively well, following lengthy treatment, but much changed by the experience. Many of the waypoints along the road she has walked will be all too familiar to people here.

The comments are worth reading, too, some of them clearly from our 'tribe'.

Link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...a-book-make-me-ill-graves-disease-sarah-perry

Do take 15 minutes to read the piece if you can. It's just beautiful.

For those who find a lengthy article too much, here are a few extracts:

I cannot say when I first began to realise I was ill, for it came on me surreptitiously, with each new symptom readily explained. I was tired, probably; I was anxious, that was it: cared too deeply about the fate of my debut novel, of the work in progress. Yet by the following Christmas I felt as though I were a badly stitched garment coming apart at the seams.

... [my GP] shook his head. Evidently I was suffering from anxiety. I required long walks. No social media. Meditation, or perhaps a reading of a devotional text.

I nodded gratefully: of course! I’d brought it all on myself, with my ambition, my ardent desire to be loved, my instant contempt for any achievement, once achieved. I was raised on a diet of original sin, and readily accepted that in this, as in all things, I was at fault.

... To venture out required drawing on an empty bank account: if I left the house – lipstick on and earrings in, these fragments shored against my ruin – I repaid the debt, with interest, in the following days.

... One evening in the bath, my heart set up a frantic pounding, then paused, as though waiting for a signal; then swiftly knocked again three times. I vaguely wondered how I might annotate it on a musical stave – a run of semiquavers, a minim’s pause, and triplets: presto agitato! Then I thought of the black double bar that marks the music’s end, and silence.

And now that she has regained most of her health:

... I am conscious that I do not have permanent leave to remain, here in the land of the well, for I am not cured, I am “managed”. I hold a temporary visa, contingent on conditions I cannot control, and find I am waiting for it to be revoked.

It is necessary for me to consider what I’ve learned, to put these dreary months to use. And what I’ve learned is this: how little I understood the daily privations of chronic illness, and how often I’ve failed to be kind.

... So I’ve been thinking, too, of a poem of Larkin’s, which was always pertinent – now more than ever, as civilisation cracks like thin ice over a deep black lake: “We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time.”
 

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765
comment:

There is a link between graves disease and stress, and there is a link between autoimmune disease and childhood abuse - which is also stressful and can cause a lot of stress in adulthood (post traumatic).

Doctors really don't know much about autoimmune disease of any kind. They are really tapping in the dark. It's ironic to call the destruction of the thyroid "a cure", because you will be dependent on medicine from that moment on. And also you still got an autoimmune disease. Only it's not attacking the thyroid anymore because the thyroid is kaputt. This is desperate measures. You might as well try shamanism. And ironically that MIGHT work because it deals with the soul.

:eek: