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Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

Rain on a Distant Roof

A Personal Journey Through Lyme Disease in Canada

by (author) Vanessa Farnsworth

Publisher
Signature Editions
Initial publish date
Oct 2013
Category
Personal Memoirs, Infectious Diseases
Recommended Age
15 to 18
Recommended Grade
10 to 12
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781927426241
    Publish Date
    Oct 2013
    List Price
    $9.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781927426234
    Publish Date
    Sep 2013
    List Price
    $19.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Rain on a Distant Roof takes readers inside the frightening but fascinating world of Lyme disease in Canada. This is the story of one woman's struggle to understand the disease that's destroying her body and mind. Armed with a confusing diagnosis, a baffling array of symptoms, and a body that's filled with diabolical bacteria, she sets out to unravel the mysteries of her malady. Along the way, she discovers challenges in properly diagnosing and treating the illness, deficits in medical testing, conflicts among medical guidelines, and a public health response that is, at best, problematic. She also discovers the bizarrely intelligent bacteria at the bottom of it all, an organism so complex and perplexing that more than 30 years after it was first discovered, researchers are still having trouble nailing it down.

 But time is running out. By 2020, it's estimated that more than 80 percent of the population of Canada will be living in regions that are endemic for Lyme disease and the numbers of people infected with the illness are expected to soar. What remains unknown about the illness continues to trump what is known, placing the health of Canadians increasingly at risk. Welcome to Lyme disease in Canada. Don't go into the woods today.

About the author

Vanessa Farnsworth's literary fiction has been published in journals across Canada and in the United States, including The Dalhousie Review, dANDelion, The New Quarterly, PRECIPICe, Qwerty, and Reed Magazine and she has published more than 100 columns and articles in national and regional publications, including Canadian Gardening, Canadian Living, Cottage, Garden Making, The Creston Valley Advance, The Grower, Harrowsmith Country Life, Kootenay Life East, Route 3, and Vitality Magazine. She holds a degree in English from Toronto's York University, a diploma in print journalism from Oakville's Sheridan College, and she studied creative writing at The Humber School for Writers.

Vanessa Farnsworth's profile page

Excerpt: Rain on a Distant Roof: A Personal Journey Through Lyme Disease in Canada (by (author) Vanessa Farnsworth)

I'm wheeled from the emergency room in the middle of the night and placed in a room alongside a morbidly obese patient who sleeps twenty hours a day and snores loud enough to trigger earthquakes two continents away.

Someone arrives to wake me up at regular intervals.

This really isn't necessary. The non-stop snoring ensures I won't be sleeping anytime soon.

Snort. Snort. Bluster. Snort. It's like lying next to a chainsaw with a faulty motor.

It occurs to me that this is what hospital administrators do to patients who can't take a hint. If a patient keeps coming back to the hospital after doctors have repeatedly dismissed her then they have no choice but to torture her in an effort to make sure that she will never, ever feel the need to come back again.

I feel like a character in a Stephen King novel.

The setting contributes to this feeling. The walls are painted a color that can best be described as drab and the window blinds -- which are inexplicably embedded between two panes of glass -- are broken, preventing them from being moved from their present position, which is partially raised yet slightly askew. The bed is a ramshackle disaster of technology that I can easily imagine being a cast-off from another, better hospital when it updated its furnishings forty years ago. And just to complete the horror-story effect, the hospital's power goes out several times one day, forcing the back-up generators to kick in and noisily expel stale air from the vents.

Again and again and again.

I half-expect a machete-wielding lunatic to burst into my room. I'm only vaguely surprised when this doesn't happen.

Or maybe it does; it's not like I would remember.

I'm in the hospital for more than a week, but my memory of that time is fragmentary, disjointed, as though someone loaded a random set of slides into a projector and is flashing them on a screen inside my brain without providing any narrative glue.

Slide 1.

Someone is speaking to me -- a nurse, I think -- but I can't understand what she's saying.

"Source black round fluid next."

"Are you talking to me?"

"Koi freak leaven irritate deer."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying."

"Winter serif all?"

"Still not getting it."

"Lewis late episode are ego ant alter window?"

"Look, whatever it is, can you just pretend I gave you the answer you're looking for?"

"Rifle did jelly art kudo?"

"Yes."

"Jungle dime?"

"All right then, no."

"Timeless dark swallow sit table juror dad."

"Screw it. You've got a brain. Whatever it is, just figure it out for yourself."

"Swat whiskey fur."

"Christ."

Slide 2.

A doctor is standing at the foot of my bed, flipping through pages in a chart that's resting on the rolling table where the trays of untouched food usually reside. He's telling me that I could be in the early stages of multiple sclerosis.

Possibly lupus.

Maybe rheumatoid arthritis.

Somehow I get the impression that the choice is mine and I try to consider the pros and cons of each disease, but quickly discover that I don't know enough about any of them to feel confident that I'll choose the one that will be the least destructive in the long run.

The conversation veers in another direction.

I fail to veer with it.

Editorial Reviews

Rain on a Distant Roof is an excellent read. I recommend it. Our politicians at all levels and physicians of every ilk should read it as well.

Jim Wilson, President, Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation

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