Porochista Khakpour’s deliberately unheroic “Sick” raises questions about what we expect of female patients with chronic illness.
Is Lyme disease a feminist issue? It may sound ludicrous to ask this of a tick-borne infection that can usually be dispatched with a course of antibiotics. Yet its name commemorates the two women living in the town of Lyme, Connecticut, who, in the mid-seventies, fought the medical establishment to have the disease acknowledged and treated. “You know,” a doctor informed one of them after failing to find the source of her symptoms, “sometimes people subconsciously want to be sick.” It’s tempting to think of this reflexive, paternalistic skepticism directed at female patients as a remnant of a bygone era. And yet there’s a class of illnesses—multi-symptomatic, chronic, hard to diagnose—that remain associated with suffering women and disbelieving experts. Lyme disease, symptoms of which can afflict patients years after the initial tick bite, appears to be one.
“I don’t care if people don’t think feminism is important, because I know it is,” the musician and early Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna says toward the end of “The Punk Singer,” Sini Anderson’s 2013 documentary about her. “And I don’t care if people don’t think late-stage Lyme disease exists, because I have it and other people have it. . . . If they don’t want to believe in it or they don’t want to care about it, that’s totally fine, but they should have to stay out of my way.” She describes an experience common to many sufferers from chronic illness—that of being dismissed as an unreliable witness to what is happening inside her. Since no single medical condition, a doctor once told her, could plausibly affect so many different systems—neurological, respiratory, gastrointestinal—she must be having a panic attack.
