Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Wednesday update...

I'm still in the middle...well nearly to the middle...of reading Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. I keep putting it down, saying that it's silly, but I keep picking it back up and reading along a litle further. I'm not liking it, excatly, but I keep wanting to know what's going to happen next. Which, I suppose, means that it is successful at least on that level.

I'm also reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997; 341 pages). It is another book lent to me by a friend. She read it for an anthropology class she took, and since my education is in anthropology she thought I'd like to read it. And it very good. It concerns a Hmong family in Central California, whose young daughter began having what were later diagnosed as severe epileptic seizures when she was just months old. The book chronicles the difficulties between the girl's family and the doctors treating her due to cultural differences in how the doctors and the family interpreted the causes of her illness and how the illness should have been treated. But it also explores the Hmong culture and history.

The difficulty I'm having in reading the book is that I suffer from extreme medical anxiety. Not only to I have anxiety issues around anything medical...hospital visits, doctor's appointments, and the like, but I can't even watch medical shows on television. I'm a little better about it than I used to be, but there are parts of the book that I can hardly stand to read. I'm determined to finish it, however, if only just to prove to myself that I can do it. We'll see how that turns out.

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