Patient
The True Story of a Rare Illness
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- 12,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
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THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED MEMOIR OF BEN WATT'S BATTLE WITH A RARE ILLNESS
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'Intensely moving' - Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph
'Quiet elegance and ringing epiphanic lyricism... a nearly flawless telling of his unexpected and drawn-out battle with an extremely rare - and nearly fatal - illness' - New Yorker
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In 1992, Ben Watt, a member of the band Everything But The Girl, contracted a rare life-threatening illness that baffled doctors and required months of hospital treatment and operations. This is the story of his fight for survival and the effect it had on him and those nearest him.
'In the summer of 1992, on the eve of a trip to America, I was taken to a London hospital with bad chest pain and stomach pains. They kept me in for two and half months. I fell very ill – about as ill it is possible to be without actually dying – confronting a disease hardly anyone, not even some doctors, had heard of. People ask what was it like, and I say yes, of course it was dramatic and graphic and all that stuff, but at times it was just kind of comic and strange. It was, I suppose, my life-changing story.'
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'Ben Watt's harrowing, candid account of his near death from one of the world's rarest diseases lives on in the mind - a fine testimonial to his fortitude, his powers as a writer and the NHS.' - William Boyd, Sunday Times
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.
