In this vulnerable, insightful memoir, the New York Times columnist tells the story of his five-year struggle with a disease that officially doesn’t exist, exploring the limits of modern medicine and the narratives we tell ourselves in order to live. In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family from Washington, D.C., to the picturesque town of Ridgefield, Connecticut, when he acquired a mysterious, devastating sickness that left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain–a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors without result and descending ever deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease that according to existing CDC definitions does not actually exist: the chronic, persistent form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of ten of thousands of people but has no official recognition, and no medically approved cure. Douthat’s search for a cure took him off the map of official medicine, into territory where miracle cures and conspiracies abound, and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment. Slowly, reluctantly, against all his instincts and assumptions, he realizes that the ‘weirdos’ searching for a cure are right and the ‘hypochondriacs’ are victims of terrible medical malpractice. ‘In a Dark Wood’ is a story about what happens when you are terribly sick and realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat you can only do so much. Along the way, Douthat describes his struggle to survive with wit and candor, portraying sickness as the most terrible of gifts. It teaches you to appreciate the grace of ordinary life by taking that life away from you. It reveals the deep strangeness of the world, the possibility that the reasonable people might be wrong, and the necessity of figuring out things for yourself. And it proves, day by dreadful day, that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and that even in the darkest wilderness there is still hope.
