Reading is my therapy

I have no money. Initially, when I was diagnosed, my bank account grew. My mast cells reacted to everything: shopping, eating out, socializing, eating in. My sole hobby became staying alive in the security of my own home. Gone were the days of Target receipts as long as my arm.

However, soon enough cocktails at happy hour were replaced with IVs in the emergency room, costing me a couple hundred dollars a month despite insurance. Add in a few hospitalizations and pharmacy bills, and I’ve been teetering on the edge of financial ruin ever since. I’d donate blood to help pay off my debt, but of course, no one wants my mutant blood.

Anyway, while my world and bank account shrank, I sought solace in library books. My local library is one of the ten buildings I can enter safely without a mast cell reaction. It has high ceilings and good airflow, but the best part is minimal social interaction! I can peacefully check out my reserved books without having to talk to or smell anyone. (I think my disease might have turned me into an introvert.)

At first, it was hard to find a book I could enjoy. In addition to brain fog, all I could think about was my pain and fears. When I was able to concentrate, I couldn’t relate to most characters. The stakes mocked my real-life struggles. Every happy ending seemed suspicious.

One day, I picked up Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. It’s a nonfiction book about the daily life and struggle to survive in a slum near Mumbai. The story is a series of horrors: poverty, heat, hunger, and violence, to name a few.

For the first few chapters, I tried relate in the only way I knew how. I imagined myself living in the slum and counted how many pages into each scene until I would inevitably die from mast cell disease. I died a lot.

I began to think about the book when I wasn’t even reading it. In the bathroom, I thought about pooping without a toilet. At night, I thought about sleeping on trash. In the morning, I thought, “If that child gets up every day to scavenge for garbage in sewage, then you can get up and take your pills.”

It was exactly the therapy I needed. This book changed my life, not because it reminded me to be grateful or that others have it worse, but because it unlocked my empathy. It stunned me into thinking about someone other than myself. I realized my grief and anxiety had driven me to self-absorption and I embraced it under the guise of self-preservation. It felt good to leave my body for a few minutes and imagine I was somewhere else, someone else.

Since then, I have regained my love of reading and acquired new problems. I’m constantly browsing the internet for new book releases and placing holds before my library even receives the copies. I obsessively check the statuses of my requests, trying to calculate whether the ebook will become available before the hard copy. Without fail, several holds usually become available all at once and I have self-induced anxiety trying to figure out how to read them all before the due date.

I prefer ebooks, especially in the winter, because I still struggle to get to the library. Hard covers often trigger my tendonitis. I love my fourth generation Kindle, which I regularly stuff into a Ziploc for Epsom salt baths. Sometimes when I’m having anxiety about due dates, I turn my Kindle onto airplane mode and hold an ebook hostage.

But then I have anxiety that an angry librarian will show up at my door. It’s totally unrealistic, but I let the ebook go.

Although treating prostaglandins has helped my brain fog, I can’t always concentrate. In the hospital, I managed to downloaded a free trial of Audible high on pain medication. I don’t remember the book title, let alone the plot; sometimes the goal is just to relax. For moderate brain fog, I recommend young adult and comic books.

Here are some books I enjoyed in the months after my diagnosis:

Easy to read

• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Heart and Brain: Gut Instincts by Nick Seluk
• Adulthood is a Myth by Sarah Andersen

Humor

• Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson
• I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Calming

• O’s Little Book of Happiness
• Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

Which books have helped you through a hard time?