Patient
The True Story of a Rare Illness
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: “Unforgettable . . . Few have told such a compelling life-story as skillfully” (San Francisco Chronicle).
In the summer of 1992, on the eve of an American tour, singer/songwriter Ben Watt, one half of the Billboard-topping pop duo Everything But The Girl, was taken to a London hospital complaining of chest pain. As his condition worsened, doctors were baffled. He was eventually he was diagnosed with a rare life-threatening autoimmune disease called Churg-Strauss Syndrome. “To paraphrase Joseph Heller,” Ben says, “you know it’s something serious when they name it after two guys.” By the time he came home, two-and-half-months later, his ravaged body was forty-six pounds lighter, and he was missing most of his small intestine.
“Unfold[ing] like a page-turning mystery” (The Los Angeles Times), and “told with great wit and without self-pity, Patient is a sobering look at how life can suddenly be transformed into a humbling vaudeville of tests, IV’s, catheters, and bedpans” (The New York Times Book Review). Injecting a frankness and natural humility into his “funny, frightening, and piercingly vulnerable” (Interview) chronicle of a medical nightmare, Ben writes about his childhood, reflects on family, and his shared life with band member and partner, Tracey Thorn. The result is “a vivid, finely wrought look at having one’s future yanked away, and surviving physically and emotionally” (Dallas Morning Star-Telegram).
A Sunday Times Book of the Year
A Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year
An Esquire (UK) Best Non-Fiction Award Finalist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1992, British pop star Watt entered a London hospital with symptoms the doctors couldn't explain. After days and nights of excruciating pain, endless tests, an operation to remove 85% of his rotting small intestine and weeks of recuperation and setback in the Intensive Therapy Unit, he learned he had an extremely rare and potentially fatal autoimmune disease called Churg-Strauss Syndrome. He chronicles here his nightmarish experiences with humor and an admirable lack of self-pity as he experiences the shock of learning he is seriously ill, adjusts to hospital life, accepts that his life has changed forever and finally goes home, emaciated and disoriented but determined to resume his career. His engrossing account is painful yet poetic, written in a stream-of-consciousness style in which he listens to the "ceaseless stream and current of thoughts and words, babbling and pulling through all our waking hours" and observes the reactions of those around him, especially his mother and his partner, Tracey, who never leave his side, and his father, who is unable to deal with the situation.
