Ever felt like something was really off with your health, but doctors couldn't figure out what? Like your body was acting up, but all the test results came back normal? Well then, this memoir is for you. The author, Meghan O'Rourke, went through that experience for years - she literally had strange, raised red bumps on her arm, arranged in a circle like Braille and no one could explain what it was. Little did she know, she was starting a long, frustrating journey into the world of poorly understood, chronic illnesses. 

O'Rourke’s experience is way more common than you might think. Millions of people are suffering from conditions where their immune system or nervous system goes a little haywire, creating an "invisible illness” that's hard to diagnose, hard to treat, and even harder to make others understand. And yet, this memoir does a great job of breaking it all down. It shows what it feels like to have a body that feels like it's betraying you, to face skepticism from medical professionals, and to have a healthcare system that’s ill-equipped to handle these illnesses that don't seem to fit into any neat boxes. 

Let’s step into this invisible kingdom and try to make sense of our bodies.

See, diagnosis is not gospel. It doesn't solve everything and sometimes may not even be accurate. Like O'Rourke, we all crave answers, don't we? That longing for a neat label, a definitive diagnosis to make sense of our suffering. But what happened next with O'Rourke proves diagnosis can sometimes crumble under the weight of reality.

A little backstory first: Heard of Lyme disease? We thought we had it figured out – a simple bacterial infection, easily detectable and treatable with a round of antibiotics. But then, the inconvenient truth emerged: some patients didn't bounce back, their symptoms came back. And thus, the term "chronic Lyme disease" was born. That’s how incomplete our diagnosis remain. How can we trust a diagnosis when the tests meant to confirm it are not always 100% accurate? This is precisely what Dr. Horowitz told O'Rourke. Finally, finally! He gave her a name. He found signs that her past Epstein-Barr virus was acting up again. Reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus is related to Lyme disease. Apparently, she had gotten Lyme disease from a tick bite. But, her test results were contradictory, suggesting a ‘maybe’ Lyme infection. And it went downhill. 

Her treatment with antibiotics didn't go smoothly. The medications actually made her symptoms worse at first, causing severe fatigue, brain fog, and times when she even debated suicide. In search of a solution, she traveled to a clinic in England for an experimental fecal transplant. The goal was to restore her gut health after the antibiotics had depleted her microbiome. The clinic explained the process, which essentially involves transplanting stool from a healthy donor to repopulate the gut bacteria. Not surprising, she experienced flu-like side effects initially as her system adjusted to the new gut microbes taking up residence. 

After 8 weeks on a special diet, she was finally able to get pregnant with her son - something she had struggled with for years due to her health issues. So yeah, it sorta worked. But it doesn’t always. In fact, her own father's early Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer was initially mistaken for a tick-borne illness because, you guessed it, diagnosis is not always perfect. 

So, you see! There is no simple narrative. Illness results from a complicated mix of influences that our current medical knowledge cannot fully untangle yet. Does that mean there’s no way to heal?