I wanted to share with you a moving and insightful review: Exquisite Journey into the Uncharted Landscape of Illness: What You Discover in these Pages are Healing Truths, July 29, 2014 By barbara mahany - See all my reviews This review is from: The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic (Hardcover) I checked this book out from the library twice, then I realized I needed to buy it. The only way to read a book this stitched with wisdom, this beautiful, is to read with ink in hand. You need to scribble, to underline, to star. You need to pen thoughts in the margin. This is a book that so exquisitely leads us into uncharted landscape, we feel the urge to commit lines to memory, and to slide a copy into the hands of all those we love who find themselves, as Nora Gallagher puts it, on the other side of the glass wall, in another country, like falling into Oz. Nora Gallagher, a poet and author, found herself at the end of 2009 staring down a mysterious constellation of symptoms -- a blur at the edge of her right eye, a headache, unfathomable fatigue -- and so, without warning or notice, she became a citizen of that otherness. During an appointment she nearly skipped, on an otherwise ordinary day, a doctor looks into her right eye, and she hears him utter one syllable that changes everything: Darn, he said. Gallagher writes, in two paragraphs I will never forget: And I dropped out of the world I lived in...and entered another country. It was a spookily familiar world, same streets, same buildings, same people -- a sci-fi version of my streets, my buildings, my people -- but it was as if the furniture were slightly rearranged, the people not quite right. It was not like another place; it was another country. It was like falling into Oz. I walked right over the border without knowing I was crossing it. It had no border patrol. I did no planning. I had no map. Dr. Lowe handed me my passport. I had it in my hands before I knew what it was. My ideas about illness and medicine and then God would soon be revealed for what they were: tickets on a train that had left the station. And so it is, the liminal landscape of illness. Before the cartographer Gallagher was here to trace its undulations, its rocky shoreline and dark valleys, this foreign country was uncharted, without markers, for those who find themselves stamped with a diagnosis, or worse, with symptoms that cant be classified, categorized, fit into some doctors square peg. Not only do you not know where you find yourself in this spookily familiar but unknown place, you have little hope of trying to translate to those on the other side just how lost you feel, and just how achingly lonely is this slippery minefield, so pocked with unmarked chutes, ones that drop you to unknown depths. The books 208 pages read like a thriller; I couldnt put it down for want of clear diagnosis, to know what mysterious malady shadowed Gallagher. But unlike any thriller, the book holds meditative passages, and detours along rivulets of wonder and wisdom that had me slowing to soak up every word and syllable and morsel of truth. Its messages are profound, never trite: The longer I resided in Oz, the more I understood how fragile life is. Isnt that the deepest truth? In deeply coming to know that our hours and our days are numbered, are undeniably drawing to a close, we realize our holiest act is to hold those hours up to the light, to extract the wholeness. In quoting Janusz Szuber, we read: Now I know inattention is an unforgivable sin. And each particle of time has an ultimate dimension. With Gallagher as our guide into this once-uncharted landscape, the one that wends through hospital corridors and drafty waiting rooms, the one where citizens ache to be noticed for the someone they are beyond their diagnosis, and where they feel the full weight of their vulnerabilities, we absorb as never before the sacred act of being acutely alive in this holy moment of Now.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 19:53:55 +0000
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