Excerpt from The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The procedure began benignly enough with a small swabbing of topical lidocaine, but in the next step a device not unlike a very small car jack was inserted in the urethra and then ratcheted out several notches until the urethra, as promised, tore. It was a blinding pain that no amount of lidocaine would dull. He peeked over the paper blanket and asked if I thought he had gone enough notches. I was crying too hard to do anything but nod. He went one more notch.

Dear, patient reader, I have not forgotten about you, or our purpose here—or the cautionary voice in the back of my head whispering something about too much information. But I think this history is important. So before we move out of this reverie, let me come quickly to the end of the beginning of our story.

That night, after Dr. Damaskus sent me hobbling back on my way, intuition's warning bell finally took up its low, steady thrum. I sat silently through dinner, and put myself to sleep early. Something was not right—something flulike, but menacing, was starting to bristle. Everything hurt, not just my urethra. My ears hurt. My teeth hurt. I fell asleep, my hands clenching and unclenching of their own accord.

When I woke, I was on the floor, quaking with rigors, drenched in sweat, and making a very bad noise. My mother was calling the hospital and dragging me toward the car. It appeared I had become septic, an infection of the bloodstream that would have ended badly if my mother weren't such a top-notch physician. We were at the hospital in minutes.

I was not witness to the miraculous save, but I heard all about it when I woke up. Top-shelf, nuclear-grade antibiotics pumped into me by the gallon, and it seemed like every doctor at Sibley Memorial Hospital came to sit by my side, making sure the doctors' daughter pulled through. I was extremely well taken care of. I was going to live. It would all be all right.

By the next day, everyone had gone back to their private practices, wishing me well, which I very much appreciated. The only problem was (and I hated to be a stickler)—I wasn't all right. I was still aching all over, badly, even though the infection was gone. I had a fever every afternoon, and intense pain all down my legs. The broken-glass pain was starting to radiate out to the surrounding muscles in the vagina, rectum, and bladder. My bowels seized up and stopped working. I itched.

"Strange," my doctors murmured, making notes. "How very strange."

They ran dozens of tests, but everything came back negative. At a loss (and at my insistence), they sent me back to school with painkillers and portable IV antibiotics. They said it would slowly all start to get better, and I believed it. When had my body ever done anything but get all better? I was ready to get back to the business of peeing and expressing my sexuality freely. I would carry my little IV from class to class if that's what it took.

But my body did not get better.

Class after feverish class, night after achy night, and morning after urethrally excruciating morning, I could not deny: it was getting much worse.

And in the most mysterious ways.

I was on so many medications and getting so sick so fast, it was like a rabbit hole had opened up beneath me—that I was falling slowly past the clocks and the candlesticks, and that my parents and doctors were peering over the edge, quietly watching me float down and away.

~

The entire point of The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness
is this:

It would have been helpful to know what a well-trafficked rabbit hole that was.

~

The unfortunate but innocuous series of medical events.
The gallons of antibiotics and fistfuls of painkillers.
The severe digestive issues, gynecologic issues, joint pain, itching, and fatigue.
The referrals, the specialists, the puzzlement.

From The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey, to be published March 17th by Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Ramey