Nora Gallagher
This taut yet lyrical memoir tells of the authorâ€™s experience with a baffling illness poised to take her sight, and gives a deeply felt meditation on vulnerability and on what it means to lose the faith you had and find something better. ,One day at the end of 2009, during a routine eye exam that Nora Gallagher nearly skipped, her doctor said, â€œDarn.â€ Her right optic nerve was inflamed, the cause unknown, a condition that if left untreated would cause her to lose her sight. And so began her departure from ordinary life and her travels in what she calls Oz, the land of the sick. It looks like the world most of us inhabit, she tells us, except that â€œthe furniture is slightly rearrangedâ€: her friends canâ€™t help her, her trusted doctors donâ€™t know whatâ€™s wrong, and what faith she has left just wonâ€™t cover it. After a year of searching for a diagnosis and treatment, she arrives at the Mayo Clinic and finds a whole town built around Oz.,In the course of her journey, Gallagher encounters inhuman doctors, the modern medical systemâ€”in which knowledge takes fifteen years to trickle downâ€”and the strange world that is the famous Mayo Clinic, complete with its grand piano. With unerring candor, and no sentimentality whatsoever, Gallagher describes the unexpected twists and turns of the path she took through a medical mystery and an unfathomably changing life. In doing so, she gives us a singular, luminous map of vulnerability and dark landscapes., ,â€œItâ€™s the nature of things to be vulnerable,â€ Gallagher says. â€œThe disorder is imagining we are not.â€
Autobiography,Memoir,Biography,Spirituality,Medical,Religion,Nonfiction,Health
Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic