‘Two Kinds of Decay’

This looks like a very interesting new memoir, written by a woman hit by severe CIDP in her early 20s. The reviews are good (if not riddled with misinformation — like implying that untreated CIDP is always fatal). Has anyone read it?

A poet’s quest to capture her excruciating illness.
By Amanda Fortini (Slate)
Posted Monday, July 7, 2008, at 6:39 AM ET

In the predictable universe of the illness memoir, doctors save by diagnosis and fail by misdiagnosis, alleviate symptoms or unintentionally increase them, order too many tests or refuse to test enough. Patients are the authors of these accounts, but physicians are the heroes and villains whose prescriptions (or lack thereof) drive the stereotypical narratives of salvation or sabotage. Sarah Manguso, winner of the Rome Prize and author of two books of poetry, cuts through these conventions in Two Kinds of Decay, a prose chronicle of her harrowing battle with a rare and incurable autoimmune blood disorder. Manguso is the diagnostician here, sizing up the usual doctor-patient drama in the terms she knows best. She suggests that the inevitably conflicted relationship—fraught with tensions and distorted projections—arises from the slippery nature of language, in particular the language used to describe the necessarily subjective experience of bodily pain.

While a 21-year-old junior at Harvard, Manguso was beset by a perplexing constellation of symptoms: numbness in her hands and feet, feebleness, difficulty breathing. She was diagnosed with chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy—a disease in which rogue antibodies present in one’s blood plasma attack the myelin sheath, the protective and connective covering of one’s nerves. For four years, Manguso suffered numerous episodes of escalating paralysis that could be reversed only through an arduous process called apherisis: Her veins were drained of the offending plasma and infused with new. (Left untreated, the disease progresses to the diaphragm, leading to suffocation and eventual death.)

Two Kinds of Decay recounts her terrifying ordeal in a series of brief, elliptical vignettes composed of sentences as spare as they are unsparing. Though the overall arc of the story is a conventional one, moving from illness to wellness (Manguso’s disease eventually went into remission), the book is less a sustained narrative than a collection of assorted memories—a reflection, perhaps, of the way the mind records trauma. “There are only a few things to remember now,” Manguso writes, “and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2194830