Review: As My Body Attacks Itself

One of my favorite things about this blog is the way that it’s allowed me to connect with so many awesome people. I hate that we are all suffering in some way, but that we can connect and that we can put our heads together and find ways to put things into words that one of us alone might not be able to is amazing. One of those awesome people I’ve been able to connect with is Kelly Morgan Dempewolf. She recently reached out and offered me a copy of her book*, giving me an opportunity to do two of the things I love most – read and help others.

Kelly has recently published a book of her experiences living with an autoimmune disorder in the book, As My Body Attacks Itself. Whether you have an actual autoimmune diagnosis, or you live with Fibromyalgia, or some other chronic illness, you will identify with her story. It’s a story of frustration, of crappy doctors, time wasted, and of hope. It’s not much different than any of our stories really. I saw a (very short) review on Amazon for this book that gave it a 3 Star rating with the comment “didn’t learn anything new”. If you live with chronic illness, you likely won’t learn anything you didn’t already know; however, you might. After all the years I’ve lived with Fibro I still pick up tips from other patients, and I can honestly say that I did pick up a couple of tips from reading Kelly’s book.

My favorite chapters of her book are those that deal with the pain scale. It’s a frustration that has irked me for so long. It’s actually one that I’ve started posts about but couldn’t figure out how to put my own frustration into words. She put it into words for me. She talked about “disease envy”; for me it’s more of a “diagnosis envy”. Heck, I even envied her diagnosis and that fact that there are treatments for it. Granted the treatments for Sjogren’s it seems aren’t much more reliable than those we have for Fibro. I have to admit that before reading her book, I didn’t realize that so many symptoms overlapped between the two; like most people I thought Sjogren’s was just dry eyes and mouth. Her experiences with doctors were also familiar, leaving an office in tears after a doctor didn’t do what he promised is something I’ve experienced.

Overall, the book is worth the read. I did have one bit of critique and that’s the large number of typos in the book, especially in the middle section. The first several chapters seemed like they had been proofed well; however, the middle section had some glaring typos that often really distracted from my enjoyment of the book. This issue seemed to clear up again through the last few chapters, so I’m guessing it was likely an issue of proofing fatigue (or just fatigue) in general during the editing process. I know I’m often guilty of not proofreading as well as I should. Typos or not this book is worth a read for anyone dealing with chronic illness, autoimmune or not. I would give this book 4 stars but only because of the typos. If the typos were corrected I’d easily give it a 5 star rating.

*book provided free for review purposes.