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These flowers bowed down by snow seemed appropriate for this article about All In My Head, and an interview with the author, by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon:
All in My Head dramatizes Kamen’s suffering without wallowing unduly in self-pity, and her journey along the highways and back roads of both Western and alternative medicine, while often hilariously rendered, will provoke anguished cries of recognition from anyone who’s dealt with chronic pain (and the medical establishment’s general befuddlement by it).
. . . A Tired Girl may suffer from migraines or depression or chronic fatigue syndrome (now called CFIDS) or fibromyalgia or bipolar disorder or the persistent, mixed-headache syndrome called chronic daily headache (CDH), which is Kamen’s diagnosis. It’s quite possible she has more than one of these conditions; scientists are now inclined to believe that these ailments (along with epilepsy and other seizure disorders) are related at the neurological level, and people who suffer from one are exceptionally likely to have the others.
. . . I’ve had to question my own preconceptions about these stereotypically female ailments, especially as I’ve learned that new, more sensitive brain scans now seem able to pinpoint their neurological source. As Kamen explains, it now appears that disorders like migraine and CDH result from a kind of wiring malfunction deep in the brain stem. Migraine, for instance, was recently described by one medical researcher as "a chronic-progressive disorder that may cause permanent changes in the brain."
. . . Individual women can admit to pain and fatigue, she argues, without stigmatizing their entire sex. Hardly anyone argues that men should be excluded from the workplace as a group, despite their pronounced tendency to . . . random shooting sprees.
. . . This seems like such an important book to me — it connects the dots on this issue of women and chronic pain in a way nobody else has done, and it’s a remarkable personal story as well.
This sounds like a must-read for any of us who struggle with chronic illness, and the self- questioning and judgement that comes with it. The Salon interview with Kamen is worth the ad non-subscribers must get through to get to it.
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