Chronic Illness Memoir

Do you live with a chronic, debilitating, yet invisible condition? You may feel isolated, out of step, judged, lonely, or misunderstood - and that's on top of dealing with your actual illness. Take heart. You are not alone, although sometimes it can feel that way. Written by a blogger who suffers from an invisible chronic illness, Surviving and Thriving with an Invisible Chronic Illness offers peer-to-peer support to help you stay sane, be your own advocate, and get back to living your life. This compelling guide is written for anyone suffering with an illness no one can see.

A riveting and candid account of a young journalist's awakening to a life of chronic illness, weaving together her personal story with reporting to shed light on how Americans live with long-term diagnoses today.

There are millions of people who experience issues related to brain health—depression, attention issues, anxiety, forgetfulness, fatigue, and even chronic pain—yet can't figure out what's causing their problems and can't find any relief. They may have seen a myriad of doctors, many of whom do not take their complaints seriously, or worse, turn to medications. David Younger's diagnostic techniques and treatment protocols will help listeners identify the true cause of their symptoms and put them on a path to healing so they no longer feel unbalanced, out of control, and exhausted.

A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: These are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.

Chronic pain, illness, and disability take so much away. Sometimes it seems as though they take everything we have ever loved and held dear. Our physical abilities and our jobs. Our current passions and future dreams. Our finances and our friends. Our sense of community and our ability to engage the world in ways we could before. Chronic pain takes away our sense of self and who we always thought ourselves to be. How in the world are we supposed to deal with this fact?

When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.

The pain you suffer from fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is not in your imagination. FMS is a real medical problem that can be as debilitating and demoralizing as it is mysterious. Fibromyalgia for Dummies, 2nd Edition, brings you the latest scientific findings on the symptoms and causes of this disease and guides you toward proven, practical steps you can take to reduce or eliminate FMS-related pain.

One day, on her way to a date, Isabella Huffington gets hit by a bike. What begins as a concussion with a diagnosed recovery time of seven-to-ten days becomes more than two years of debilitating pain with no apparent end and a string of unhelpful doctor and specialist visits. In the wreckage, jobs are canceled. Leases are broken. There is no second date. What’s left is Isabella, her body, and her pain. Because the source of her pain cannot be located within the body, she is told over and over that her pain is psychosomatic. And Isabella believes it, over and over.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

Brita grew up a competitive athlete, full of happiness and excitement for life. There wasn’t much that would take her out of a game as she constantly pushed her body to the limits. When she was unable to compete due to unknown and undiagnosed illness, she entered a world that was unfamiliar, and began to sink into a darkness she could never have imagined.

In her harrowing, defiant, and unforgettable memoir, Sarah Ramey recounts the decade-long saga of how a seemingly minor illness in her senior year of college turned into a prolonged and elusive condition that destroyed her health but that doctors couldn't diagnose or treat. Worse, as they failed to cure her, they hinted that her devastating symptoms were psychological. The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is a memoir with a mission: to help the millions of (mostly) women who suffer from unnamed or misunderstood conditions.

Marian Schembari was thirty-four years old when she learned she was autistic. By then, she’d spent decades hiding her tics and shutting down in public, wondering why she couldn’t just act like everyone else. Therapists told her she had Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, social anxiety, and recurrent depression. They prescribed breathing techniques and gratitude journaling. Nothing helped. It wasn’t until years later that she finally learned the truth: she wasn’t weird or deficient or moody or sensitive or broken. She was autistic.

If you’re tired of carrying the burden of pain and discomfort and you're fed up with the medical system having no answers for you, look no further. In Peace over Pain, Dr. Kevin Reese lifts the curtain on the medical monopoly and uncovers why they can only manage your chronic conditions. He goes on to provide his revolutionary solution for correcting the body quicker and more efficiently than any other therapeutic approach. Using his unique method, he claims the health burden can be eliminated in months, not years. This is healing wisdom ahead of its time!

Alan Gordon, a psychotherapist and the founder of the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, was in grad school when he started experiencing chronic pain and it completely derailed his life. He saw multiple doctors and received many diagnoses, but none of the medical treatments helped. Frustrated with conventional pain management, he developed Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a mind-body protocol that eliminated his own chronic pain and has transformed the lives of thousands of his patients.

In the fall of 1995, Dr. Saray Stancic was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By 2003, she walked regularly with a cane, had given up virtually all unnecessary physical activity, and was on numerous medications, all with horrible side effects. After stumbling upon some studies that linked MS outcomes to diet and lifestyle, Dr. Stancic undertook a radically different approach to managing her illness.

In this accessible and groundbreaking book - filled with the moving stories of real people medical doctor and best-selling author Gabor Maté shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness, including breast cancer, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis and many others, even Alzheimer's disease.

Finding Joy presents a comprehensive, practical guide for living your best life with chronic illness. This psychology self-help book integrates personal and professional insights to give you tools for handling various aspects of living with a chronic illness. There is also a chapter specifically for the loved ones and caregivers of the chronically ill. While this book is designed for anyone with a chronic illness, the spiritual content early in the book suggests the value of sticking to your faith and offers several Bible references.

Dr. Judy Mikovits is a modern-day Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher shaking up the old boys' club of science with her groundbreaking discoveries. And like many women who have trespassed into the world of men, she uncovered decades-old secrets that many would prefer to stay buried.

After a number of years of being chronically ill with Lyme disease, Jenny Rush had a momentary realization that she was overlooking a lesson that was resulting in continued ill health. As she went into her last year of dealing with chronic illness at a physical level, Jenny shifted her primary focus from the illness itself to addressing the multitude of experiences that the illness was provoking.

Allie Cashel has suffered from chronic Lyme disease for 16 years - but much of the medical community refuses to recognize her symptoms as the result of infectious disease. In Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial, Cashel paints a living portrait of what is often called post-treatment Lyme syndrome, featuring the stories of chronic Lyme patients from around the world and their struggle for recognition and treatment.