In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America

by Laurie Edwards

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  From Plato to Polio

  Chronic Disease in Historical Context

  Chapter 2

  An Awakening

  Medicine and Illness in Post–World War Two America

  Chapter 3

  Disability Rights, Civil Rights, and Chronic Illness

  Chapter 4

  The Women’s Health Movement and Patient Empowerment

  Chapter 5

  Culture, Consumerism, and Character

  Chronic Illness and Patient Advocacy in the 1980s and 1990s

  Chapter 6

  A Slight Hysterical Tendency

  Revisiting “The Girl Who Cried Pain”

  Chapter 7

  Into the Fray

  Patients in the Digital Age

  Chapter 8

  Participatory Medicine and Transparency

  Chapter 9

  What Future, at What Cost?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  By the Same Author

  A Note on the Author

  For Victoria,

  my joy

  Introduction

  When I was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, Boston’s famed Longwood Medical Area was as much my place of education as the small parochial grammar school I attended. Some of my most vivid memories were of my mother driving me down Route 9 to my doctor appointments, past the strip malls and chain restaurants of the western suburbs, past the reservoir in Brookline, where the crimson autumn leaves formed a circle around the gray expanse of water. These morning drives are almost always sunny and autumnal in my memory; we would squint up as we were stopped at traffic lights, always worried about being a little late, always underestimating the drive or underestimating our likelihood of getting every red light through three or four towns.

  If it was a good appointment, I’d leave with an antibiotic script for my ever-present ear and sinus infections, a follow-up appointment, or a referral for yet another specialist for my wheezy lungs. If it was a bad appointment, it would usually involve a CT scan, a blood test, or the scheduling of another surgery. Either way, we’d get in the car and head back down Route 9, usually too late for me to make it back to school—I knew this would happen but wore my uniform anyway—but just early enough to beat rush-hour traffic. We would talk about my upcoming surgery, or about the books I would get as presents for my recovery, or the classes I’d missed and the sleepover I hoped I’d make it to on the weekend.

  But chronic illness? I don’t remember hearing that term, and I certainly don’t remember using it in reference to my own patient experiences. I lived in reaction to each illness event, never quite acknowledging the larger pattern.

  It wasn’t just another infection, another setback, another disruption. It wasn’t going to go away.

  Certainly, I don’t blame the grade school version of myself for overlooking this distinction, or the high school and college version, either. Even if I knew it intellectually by then, emotionally it was another adjustment altogether. And I know I wasn’t alone. In fact, I think this is the most daunting aspect of any chronic illness, whether you are the patient grappling with a diagnosis or a healthy person who hopes it never happens to you: It isn’t going to go away.

  Back then, I was a kid who was sick, who divided her time between school, friends and family, and doctors and hospitals. Now, I am an adult patient with lung and autoimmune diseases: primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), bronchiectasis, and celiac disease, among other conditions. I cough and wheeze a lot, and since I don’t have the working cilia to flush out mucus and debris from my lungs and respiratory tract, I get a lot of infections that compromise my airways and my oxygenation. I have daily chest physical therapy, in which my lung lobes are “clapped” in several different positions. I take pills for a sluggish thyroid and use inhalers and nebulizers to help keep my airways open, and long-term antibiotics are a necessary evil in my world. I’ve spent far too many weeks of my life in the hospital, including the trauma unit and the ICU, but I’ve also done so much of what healthy people do: graduated high school and college; studied abroad for a year; pursued a graduate degree; and got married. I spent four long years trying to have a child and made it through a medically intensive, complicated pregnancy to deliver a healthy little girl. I work full time and have freelance work. These are the extremes that characterize life with chronic illness, and almost 130 million Americans contend with them to some degree.1

  Much about chronic illness has changed since I was a child. People with cystic fibrosis, a disease similar to my own lung disease, have seen their life expectancy reach almost forty, and people with type 1 diabetes can use insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors to control their blood sugar instead of relying on shots. It is now a mandate that clinical research trials include women and minorities, and the thorny relationship between pain and gender is discussed more widely.2 Children now spend more time watching television or using computers than playing outside, and First Lady Michelle Obama launched a campaign to fight against childhood obesity. Patients can e-mail their doctors and get text messages from their pharmacies, and social media platforms are now places where patients connect and advocate.

  It is a whole different world, indeed. Cultural, scientific, political, and economic influences have changed how we classify and respond to the patient with chronic illness. Centuries ago, disease was thought to stem from an imbalance of bodily humors and fluids; infectious plagues were blamed on divine retribution; people with tuberculosis were shipped off to sanatoriums; and diseases like multiple sclerosis were considered nervous or hysterical disorders. In more recent decades past, chronic illness conjured images of arthritic elderly patients, and cancer was still spoken of in metaphors and hushed tones, which Susan Sontag assailed in her polemic Illness as Metaphor.

  When the idea for this book first took root several years ago, I was a young college English instructor teaching a debut course called “Constructions of Health in Contemporary Literature” to a group of college freshman interested in the health sciences. As we tackled such heavyweights as David B. Morris and Sontag, I worried about relevancy. Would my students see the connections between illness and culture, between the words we use to describe and assimilate illness and the actual patient experience? They might not have been as intrigued or riled up by the use of metaphorical language as I was, but relevancy was not something I needed to worry about, after all. They spoke of loved ones with cancer, and of depression and addiction. They were riveted by Frontline’s Age of AIDS documentary, and wondered how proceeds from the red Razr phones they saw advertised would really play into AIDS research, as the holiday commercials they watched touted. They saw the blurring of consumption, culture, and sickness, and they realized that the science they learned in other classes did not exist in the vacuum of the classroom or the laboratory.

  In 1999 the scholar and medical historian Roy Porter asserted, “Disease is a social development no less than the medicine that combats it.”3 Porter’s claim is equally germane today, even though, as my students and I discovered, the stakes have changed. Now, for as much knowledge as we have about the biological origins of many genetic, autoimmune, and viral disorders, still millions live with illnesses that aren’t merely “invisible” to others but are not easily identified in laboratories or imaging centers, either. For as many technological and lifestyle resources as we have at our disposal, for as “good” as our health is compared to centuries past, larger
numbers of us are sick.

  “The medical arena is just a microcosm of society in general,” says Dr. Sarah Whitman, a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of chronic pain, one of the most common and debilitating manifestations of chronic illness. The tensions surrounding sex, gender, socioeconomic status, and power that dominate our cultural consciousness are the same ones so instrumental to the emergence of chronic illness as social phenomenon. While female patients with CFIDS (chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome) are told their symptoms are the somatic manifestations of upper-middle-class social anxiety, patients with diseases as varied as HIV or type 2 diabetes labor under their own stigmas: that they are responsible for their preventable illnesses and that their lifestyle choices are subject to judgment by others. And of course, the rampant health disparities between rich and poor are drawn out in spectacularly dramatic fashion when it comes to chronic disease: fewer resources and less access to care equals less prevention, more disease progression, and a whole host of confluent problems. On the Internet and on television and radio programs, political debates about health care reform continue to rage on.

  So how do we begin to unravel all of this?

  Thirty years ago Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick … sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”4 As the scope of chronic conditions continues to widen, Sontag’s distinction is even more poignant. The statisticians and experts tell us that more and more of us do—or will—belong to that “other place.” For one, we live longer and have more interventional therapies available so we accumulate inevitable ailments of aging. For another, those with serious diseases have better diagnostics and treatments, meaning they too are living longer into adulthood with serious illness. On the whole, our lifestyle shifts also play a role in the irritatingly named “diseases of affluence.” Western society not only cultivates but exports cancer, obesity, coronary heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic conditions to developing nations.5

  As it did with the infectious and communicable diseases of the past, science is responsible for un-shrouding the mysteries of chronic illness. In some cases, it has; but in many others, the competing forces of fear, guilt, and shame blur the clarifications science supposedly offers us. A gap still exists between the potential of science and technology to answer questions about disease and the social constructs we erect around notions of what it means to be ill.

  From online forums and patient blogs to social media, direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals, and consumer health privacy concerns, technology asserts itself into the patient experience in numerous ways. For example, we can trade stories and swap advice; we can push for research or work to increase awareness of little-known disorders. Vaccinations against communicable diseases represent some of modern medicine’s greatest triumphs, yet perhaps nowhere has the sharing of anecdotal patient stories had more impact than in the controversy over childhood vaccinations. Here, the power of the patient activist and new media is pitted against the established institutional authority of medicine, and just how this battle plays out will have profound consequences for us all.

  As a health and science writer, I see trends like individual responsibility for behavior versus random chance or genetic mutations, consumption versus philanthropy, and the basic working definitions of what is “healthy” versus what is “sick” through the prism of journal articles and analysis. As a lifelong patient with multiple chronic illnesses, I see the physical realities of chronic illness as well as their emotional implications. Every day, I wake up, feed my child, take my medications, and put on the trappings of the well. I am her mother, first and foremost, and that does not change depending on my symptoms.

  In front of a classroom of students or on the phone with a freelance client, I might be many things, but I am not sick. Even if they hear my hacking cough or notice the dark circles under my eyes, they do not know the reality of what goes on behind my front door, or in my doctor’s office or a hospital room. I am used to such deceiving appearances, and I depend on technology to keep up the façade when I need it.

  On days when I feel worse, it is an active, deliberate choice to enter Sontag’s kingdom of the well, just as it is sometimes a conscious act to breathe, to focus on the rhythms of inhale and exhale and not the chortling wheezes and sticky congestion that make those motions so challenging. I am not alone in this daily negotiation, and beyond the numbers are the compromises and compensations made by all people living with some form of chronic condition.

  In the Kingdom of the Sick is a combination of research, literature, and stories from patients across the chronic disease spectrum. Literary inspiration comes from many sources, from Katherine Anne Porter’s tale of the post–World War One influenza pandemic, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”—which I first read in high school—to A Life in Medicine, a compilation edited by Dr. Robert Coles and others that includes fiction and nonfiction tales of treating patients, of living with illness, of fear, beauty, and mortality. The rich contents of A Life in Medicine piqued my interest while I was a graduate student and fledgling instructor. Books by Andrew Solomon, Paula Kamen, Roy Porter, David Rothman, and many, many others made me start asking questions.

  • What does it mean for patients that the definition of chronic illness is fairly static but its scope has changed so much?

  • How will long-standing gender biases in the treatment and diagnosis of pain shift if we find more evidence to support biological differences between how women and men experience pain?

  • How will technology change the doctor-patient relationship, and how will technology empower patients?

  • Will patients with chronic illness ever see the type of focused mobilization that made the disability and HIV/AIDS movements a success?

  • And, as Roy Porter queried, if disease is a social development as much as its treatments are, what will the experience of living with chronic illness be like as we move forward?

  In a way, I see these writers as specialists, people who have focused on one topic (pain, disability, gender, cancer, autoimmune disease, etc.) masterfully. In writing about chronic illness, I am an inevitable generalist, someone who is pulling ideas together and looking at larger patterns among them in a different way. As such, In the Kingdom of the Sick is a big-picture book, focusing less on disease-specific symptoms and more on the universal aspects of the circumstances in which illness unfolds.

  Though it is not a uniform linear history of disease, In the Kingdom of the Sick does focus primarily on the decades following World War Two, decades in which science, politics, and social justice all converged in such a way as to leave a lasting, transformative impression on the illness experience. I am not a sociologist, a historian, a physician, or a legal scholar. I am a lifelong patient with chronic illness who has always had health insurance, who has had access to some of the best hospitals in the world, and who nonetheless spent much of her life as a medical mystery within those hallowed institutions. Like it or not, I will take medication and have chest physical therapy for the rest of my life. I will never know what it is to be “healthy,” but I have learned that it is not worth the time and energy to lament or miss something you never had. I blog about chronic illness, I e-mail my doctors and log medical data on my iPhone, and it is only through technology that I have spoken to or met anyone else with my rare disease, PCD.

  As one of my interviewees, e-Patient Dave deBronkart, described it, today’s health care system is like a mobile with billions of pieces spinning around. Pulling at a thread will shift the other pieces around in a way that is complex and hard to predict. That analogy is at play in the chronic illness experience. Health care reform, direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, the influence of the environment and chemical exposure, socioeconomics, gender, politics,
etc.—are all threads from the mobile, and each is interconnected to other threads. Here is where I stop pulling, stand still, and reflect on the threads that resonate most with me as a writer and as a patient with chronic illness.

  If, as David B. Morris says, illness tells us more about an era or an individual than health does, we now find ourselves at an intersection, lodged between the promise of science and technology and lingering assumptions about people who are forced to dwell in the kingdom of the sick. What will their future look like? To hazard a guess, we must probe where attitudes about chronic illness came from, and where they stand today.

  Chapter 1

  From Plato to Polio

  Chronic Disease in Historical Context

  Thirty-year-old Melissa McLaughlin remembers in painstaking detail when she first became sick. It was late October 1994, and the then high school sophomore’s crammed schedule reflected an active, passionate teenager: Advanced Placement courses, dance classes and competitions, the dance classes she taught to younger students, babysitting her siblings, volunteering. As a competitive dancer, she depended on her body to keep up with her rigorous schedule, and it always had.

  “Everything was normal,” she says.

  The weeks building up to the seismic shift that would turn the energetic teenager into a wheelchair-bound young woman living in constant pain were normal, if hectic. She threw a Halloween party for the dance students she taught, and sat for the PSATs. Her last “normal” day was spent with friends painting the walls of a homeless shelter. By the day’s end, the whole group was sweaty, exhausted, and covered in paint.

  “All of us were worn out, but I just never got better,” McLaughlin says, describing how she went to sleep that night and woke up with a high fever and extreme fatigue and body aches. For the first few weeks, she slept twenty-two hours a day, and her doctors initially diagnosed her with mononucleosis. At this point, she, like her doctors and most people around her, figured with a few more weeks of rest, she would be fine. That was how an acute condition like mono worked: you got it, you lived through it for a few weeks, and then it went away. Case closed. For many people, this is the trajectory we associate with illness. We are familiar with both ends of the spectrum: the short, acute infections and injuries of everyday life and the terminal cases of cancer, heart disease, or stroke that have a finite end. Chronic illness is somewhere in the middle, confounding and unfamiliar.