Amy Tan saved my life

I was on my way home from Southern California looking at graduate schools and reading Amy Tan's memoir The Opposite of Fate. Before reading this, I was a medical anomaly. Ms. Tan introduced me to Lyme disease, something I did not even think of looking into when I was researching MS and brain tumor symptoms. Since I can't really put my feelings into words about the situation, here are the excerpts from the book that made the light bulb go off in my head:

"I felt as if something in my body had broken. Something was not right." (367)

"Small sounds startled me, made me leap and jerk, then imagine descendants of the boogieman from my childhood." (368)

"Now I was paying the price for arrogance about my good health. I had been thrown into the maze of hospital corridors and insurance forms, with every procedure automatically denied by a grand vizier who lived unseen behind an 800 number. To this magistrate of maladies, my symptoms did not exist unless I died from them. So for now, since I was still very much alive, the tests were unnecessary and not covered." (376)

"What if I had to spend the rest of my life being this lethargic and foggy-headed and not know why? What if I would never again have the energy to hike along the trail of Mount Tamalpais?" (377)

"Time after time, the tests came back disgustingly 'normal'. To me, 'normal' meant that I had failed the tests. I wanted numbers that were tangibly abnormal, anything that would explain the problems, lead to the correct treatment, and enable me to return to a truer normal, to be oblivious of my state of health. Soon the doctors would exhaust the possibilities, and if nothing was found, they would give me a benevolent look, tell me that I was quite healthy, and that I should discuss this further with my psychiatrist." (378)

"Driving a car was no longer something I could do with natural ease. It became a mental chore, a test of my reflexes. I marveled that most people knew automatically not to break at green lights but to do so at stop signs. Colors and foot movements became tricky, as did directions." (384)

"Why had I never thought to test myself? The reason was simple: I had never seen the 'bull's-eye rash' that everyone said was the defining sign of a tick gone bad." (387)

"As I scanned the websites on Lyme disease, I felt the heightened tension of reading the inevitable conclusion of a murder mystery. I could not stop imagining the various scenarios, me blithely enjoying myself, walking along a grassy path on a gorgeous day, while the little vampire scurried up my leg. I wanted to envision it so that I could uselessly ask 'Why me?' Why had I, out of hundreds of thousands who might have passed the same spot, become a hapless meal for a nymph tick? What was I doing while the spirochetes were swimming in my bloodstream, using their corkscrew tails to propel themselves quickly into my tissue, my organs, my brain? Because that tick bite had changed the course and quality of my life, I wanted to be able to capture the precise moment, see it as live feed on a CNN monitor. I wanted to play it back repeatedly, and the moments right before and after, as we do with all the great and terrible moments of our life, the ones that are both personal and universal, the seconds that changed out world forever." (390)

"The Lymies demanded to know why the medical community had been so hasty, so determined to say short-term treatment was good enough. They pointed out that no one even knew for certain what the etiology of Lyme disease was until 1982. And in twenty years, there had not been enough research to know how to knock back borrelia's hydra-headed ways of invading the body and remaining entrenched in its favorite eatery, the brain." (392)

"I had to know who my terrorist was. I had to visualize what was now in my body. My enemy was a spirochete, a clever bacterium with a tail, four times more complex in its genetic structure than the spirochete that causes syphilis, for which patients are given months of antibiotic treatment. Like the frightening creatures of Alien moviedom, the borellia spirochete is a smart bug that has the ability to transform itself into other forms, a cellular version of a wolf in sheep's clothing, able to hide and go unrecognized by antibiotics and the body's immune defenses." (392)

"Simply by having Lyme disease, I have been drawn into the medical schism over both diagnosis and treatment. I now know the greated danger that borelia has highlighted: ignorance." (397)

"I have a persistent infection. And I am also, by nature, quite persistent. I persisted in finding the right doctor, finding the bug that got me. I will do what it takes to get well, ignorance and medical politics be damned. I am in charge of my body now" (397)

These experiences are identical to mine from the past year.

Ms. Tan, if you are reading this, thank you for speaking up about your experience. It sure helped me! (Please correct me if my citations are screwy, it's been a few years since I've used MLA or APA).

Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

The biggest difference between me and Ms. Tan is that she is an internationally best-selling writer and I am an unemployed woman with $46 in her bank account, so Ms. Tan can actually afford the thousand dollar treatments. Do I seem bitter?