I swear I’ll be going back to fiction soon, but a bunch of nonfiction has been coming in lately and I need to get through them all first! This one I’ve picked up pretty much directly as a result of my recent health issues, and the difficulties I’ve had about getting treatment and understanding it.
Invisible Kingdom is mostly the discussion of how the author navigated the healthcare system to find a diagnosis and treatment for a condition that she had been dealing with for years, from doctors dismissing her to misdiagnosis to the desperation of trying anything to get some kind of relief, to finally finding something that made her life bearable and the understanding that this was going to be something she would have to deal with indefinitely.
As someone who has more recently found themselves with a chronic condition1 and who has been struggling to get things like accommodations from work and a doctor who can advise me on what I can do to mitigate some of the issues, I really resonated with the ideas in the book. It’s not a plan or an outline for how to get treatment so much as a journey and discussion about the things that could be better. And on the whole, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and commiserate with the issues. It would have been nice to have solutions, but ultimately this is an issue that patients are not going to be able to resolve at this point, so familiarity is a great comfort.
Overall, I did really like this, even if it wasn’t necessarily the hopeful read or guidebook that I wanted. If you’re also dealing with some strange health conditions and struggling to figure out how to manage a life where they may never go away or trying to navigate the healthcare system, this may be a good read for you too.
- Thanks Covid [↩]