A Body Made of Glass Quotes

“If I have to inhabit a fragile meat vessel that could disintegrate at any moment, at least don't make me think about it all the time.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Fairy tales and folklore are full of this moment: a potion to be swallowed that will transform or destroy a life....When life is especially difficult or hard, the notion that just a single action could render everything straightforward and easy is especially attractive. This is part of our wider impulse to narrativize. The hardships must mean something. The cure must be dramatic and all-encompassing, because incremental or intermittent improvements make for a terrible story.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Illness is a story we tell about ourselves. The narrative is the connective tissue that joins together the symptoms and perceptions and makes sense of them. It's how impenetrable concepts like death and life become something that can be incorporated comfortably into day-to-day existence. A serious illness is much easier to cope with if it can be slotted into a familiar structure with a beginning, middle, and end. It's also why metaphors of battle or struggle are so popular for describing sickness. It draws the line between them and us, good and evil.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“I wonder if the hypochondriac him or herself is a metaphor, a condensed node of ideas about illness crushed together into one individual. I am pressed between these layers of meaning like a flower preserved between the pages of a book, trapped in narratives about my sickness that have already been written.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“If I have to inhabit a fragile meat vessel that could disintegrate at any moment, at least don’t make me think about it all the time.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Accepting that the body is a wildly complicated and mysterious entity composed of many overlapping systems that can misfire at any moment for no discernable reason and without seeking any permission from the consciousness that inhabits it is far less satisfying than believing in a grand unified theory that governs it all.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“...at its simplest, hypochondria is a fear of death. Or perhaps it is more accurate to call it fear of the fear of death. In the worst moments of uncertainty, the idea of being given a terminal diagnosis and a remaining period of time to live is not the most terrifying outcome. Those who live relatively anxiety-free lives will not understand this at all, but there is a certain - very strange - satisfaction to be gained from seeing the worst-case scenario come true. At least it would be solid information, from which a plan could be made for the time that is left. Not knowing is constantly living on the edge of a precipice, braced for the fall but never actually falling off. It is existing in perpetual limbo, never being sure if tomorrow will come in the same way that today did. The present is ruined for fear of what the future might bring.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“It is impossible to condense every sensation and symptom into a believable account that someone else can understand. Feelings change second to second...How can all of this ever be condensed into a few words for the consumption of someone who has not experienced it, or anything like it? Talking about it, all the time, narrating in real time, is exhausting and can make you feel like a burden to loved ones and caregivers. When the doctor calls in the evening, I will curate the story of the day, picking the elements that I feel are most relevant. It is my illness, after all, and my story to tell...Hypochondria is a perpetual act of this choosing, of living at all times in the act of deciding what version of yourself is least likely to attract ridicule or scorn.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“You look well," a friend will say as you arrive at the restaurant and remove your coat...Most of the time, this is greeted as the casual compliment that the speaker intends, and the world continues to turn...But when you are not well, or believe that you are not well, this exchange becomes fraught with meaning, most of it uncomfortable.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Being this size suits you."
I know she is being nice, but I think of the sixteen days in the last month that I spent unable to eat anything but a single teaspoon of yogurt, and how the chemotherapy destroyed the lining of my mouth and throat so that anything I put in it burns.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Hypochondria only has questions, never answers, and that makes us perpetually uneasy.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“The sheer variety of procedures I had undergone in my late teens...had given me a level of comfort with the rarer elements of medicine that was unusual. More than that, though, the awareness crept up on me that I spent so much more time and effort on this aspect of life than anyone else I knew, even though I supposedly had no active conditions requiring treatment.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Doing nothing requires a level of trust in the inner processes of the human body and medicine's understanding of them that most of us do not have. Like an overly exacting teacher pointing out failures but never praising successes, we are inclined to remember only the times when our bodies have let us down. Why would I trust my body to heal itself unaided when, left to its own devices, it has previously developed tumors?”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety