The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
Meghan O'Rourke
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is a loneliness to illness, a child's desire to be pitied and seen. But it is precisely this recognition that is elusive. How can you explain and identify your condition if not one has any grasp of what it is you suffer from and the symptoms wax and wane? How do you describe a disease that's not always there?”
“I know many people who are suspicious of diagnoses—they think of them as labels that reduce or stigmatize. I knew, already, that a diagnosis was not going to answer all my questions. But I craved a diagnosis because it is a form of understanding.”
“And so it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick.”
“This seems like one of the hardest things about being sick in the way you’re sick: being sick makes you stressed. But being stressed makes you sicker.”
“There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. Until we mourn what is lost in illness—and until we have a medical community that takes seriously the suffering of patients—we should not celebrate what is gained in it.”
“But the fatigue of physical dysfunction, I came to recognize, is as different from normal sleep deprivation as COVID-19 is from the common cold. It was not caused by needing sleep, I thought, but by my body’s cellular conviction that it needed to conserve energy in order to fix whatever was wrong. The feeling erased my will, the sense of identity that drives most of us. The worst part of my fatigue was the loss of an intact sense of self.”
“Only a few friends realized at the time how much physical suffering I was undergoing. We are bad at recognizing the suffering of others unless we are given clear-cut clues and evidence. And so invisible illnesses often go unacknowledged, while less serious conditions get attention.”
“The tendency in many parts of medicine is, if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, or the patient is cuckoo.”
“Ethical loneliness is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.”
“To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” The same was true of all my symptoms, none of which could be seen. In those months I was lonely in a way I never had been before. I could taste the solitude of the human body like brine in my mouth, a taste that never left me. •”
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Book Keywords:
autoimmune-disease, disability, chronic-illness, illness, chronic-illness-stigma, doctors-and-patients
