His wife, working on a book of her own and pregnant with the couple’s third child, describes their situation as “just like ‘The Shining’ - except we’re both writers.”ĭouthat sees symbols everywhere he is telling a story not only of his own illness, but also about the stories we tell ourselves, secular and religious, to make sense of illness. He ruminates on fairy tales and dreams of wandering a gothic mansion, chased by vampires.
Many patients and a dissenting faction of doctors have bucked this advice, with varying regimens and results.Īs Douthat’s health declines in harrowing ways, a darkness settles over his “haunted” house, which turns out to be a fixer-upper he has no energy to fix. So the official advice is, essentially, to wait it out. Long-term antibiotic use for persistent symptoms has known risks and, thus far, unproven benefits. The course of treatment is less obvious, as anyone familiar with the so-called Lyme Wars will anticipate. Tests eventually reveal Lyme antibodies (though not enough for a definitive diagnosis) and a co-infection, Bartonella. Only after Douthat completes his move north to Connecticut, namesake of Lyme disease, does it seem obvious to local doctors that he is suffering from something tick-borne. A psychiatrist, his 11th doctor in 10 weeks, disagrees. doctor suggests stress as the culprit - as do, in subsequent visits, an internist, neurologist, rheumatologist and gastroenterologist. A few weeks later, he is in an emergency room at dawn with an alarming full-body shutdown, “as if someone had twisted dials randomly in all my systems.” The E.R. The urgent care doctor he sees first diagnoses him with a harmless boil. Back in D.C., Douthat has a swollen lymph node, a stiff neck and strange vibrations in his head and mouth.
On the afternoon of their final home inspection, he wanders into the meadow out back, watches the deer frolic and reflects that the purchase “felt like confirmation that we were on the right path, that I had planned and worked and won the things I wanted and that I deserved them.”īut the scene is tinged with dread: Something is lurking in those woods.
He’s feeling optimistic, maybe a little self-satisfied. Feeling the pull of home and burned out by life on Capitol Hill, Ross Douthat (a New York Times columnist) and his wife buy a 1790s farmhouse on three acres of Connecticut pasture.
The early chapters of “The Deep Places” unfold like the first act of a horror movie. THE DEEP PLACES A Memoir of Illness and Discovery By Ross Douthat
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