Illness narratives usually have startling beginnings—the fall at the supermarket, the lump discovered in the abdomen, the doctor’s call. Not mine. I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: “gradually and then suddenly.” One way to tell the story is to say that I was ill for a long time—at least half a dozen years—before any doctor I saw believed I had a disease. Another is to say that it took hold in 2009, the stressful year after my mother died, when a debilitating fatigue overcame me, my lymph nodes ached for months, and a test suggested that I had recently had Epstein-Barr virus. Still another way is to say that it began in February of 2012, on a windy beach in Vietnam; my boyfriend and I were reading by the water when I noticed a rash on my inner arm—seven or eight vibrantly red bumps. At home in New York, three days later, I had a low fever. For weeks, I drifted along in a flulike malaise that I thought was protracted jet lag. I began getting headaches and feeling dizzy when I ate. At talks I gave, I found myself forgetting words. I kept reversing phrases—saying things like “I’ll meet you at the cooler water.”
