The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

by Meghan O'Rourke

One day, as I sat beside her on the couch where she rested, she opened her warm brown eyes and said, in a brief moment of clarity, “I just don’t want you to spend your life going from hill to hill, Meg. There are other ways to live.” She died at the age of fifty-five on Christmas Day 2008; the next morning I ended up in urgent care with a sinus infection. “Poor thing,” the clinic doctor in Fairfield said, after examining my ears and nose. “You’ve let this get really severe. But the antibiotics will clear it up. Get some rest.” I took a course of antibiotics, I rested, and I never got better. It is hard to know what happened when, because for so long I wasn’t sure that I was sick. Sometimes I wonder, had I always been sick, since I was a child with aching knees and bouts of exhaustion? Or had I not been sick at all until my family rented a house after my college graduation, close to Lyme, Connecticut, after which my neurological symptoms began? Was life perhaps just a long chronic illness, as a prominent feminist historian would later ask me after I gave a talk about chronic illness—an implication being that it was my identification with my illness that made me “ill”? (Alexander Pope: “This long disease, my life.” But Pope, historians think, lived with Pott’s disease, or tuberculosis of the spine, from childhood on.)