Sick Girl

by Amy Silverstein

Overview

The hardcover publication of Sick Girl garnered tremendous attention, generated impressive sales, and ignited controversy. Both inspiring and provocative, reactions to the book ranged from inflammatory posts on a U.S. News & World Report blog, to hundreds of letters from readers, to a full-page review in People. Amy’s force, candor, and her refusal to be the thankful patient from whom we expect undiluted gratitude for the medical treatments that have extended her life, have put her at the center of a debate on patient rights and the omnipotent power of doctors.  At twenty-four, Amy was a typical type-A law student: smart, driven, and highly competitive. With a full course load and a budding romance, it seemed nothing could slow her down. Until her heart began to fail. Amy chronicles her harrowing medical journey from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing recovery, which is made all the more dramatic by the romantic bedside courtship with her future husband, and her uncompromising desire to become a mother.  In her remarkable book she presents a patient’s perspective with shocking honesty that allows the reader to live her nightmare from the inside—an unforgettable experience that is both disturbing and utterly compelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802143877
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	931,146
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Amy Silverstein was the author of Sick Girl, which won a Books for a Better Life Award and was a finalist for the Borders Original Voices Award, and My Glory Was I Had Such Friends. She earned her Juris Doctor at New York UniversitySchool of Law, served on the Board of the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), and was an active speaker and writer on women’s health issues and patient advocacy. She lived in New York.

Editorial Reviews

Silverstein's memoir offers a rare glimpse at life as an organ-transplant recipient. She was a young law student when the first signs of a deadly virus in her heart appeared. When her doctor said she merely needed to keep her stress in check and add salt to her diet, she happily complied. At 25, after several months of terrifying symptoms and misdiagnoses, she received a heart transplant. Like all organ recipients, to prevent her body from rejecting her new heart, she depends on high doses of immunosuppressants-bitter "poison" that leaves her nauseous, trembling, aching, and highly vulnerable to infection-for the rest of her life, which was only expected to last another 10 years. To better her chances, she heeded her doctors' advice, sacrificing everything from coffee to alcohol to pregnancy. Still, it seemed that the best she could hope for was the illusion of a normal life, so she kept her body's punishing blows from her friends, her adopted son and at times even from her loving husband, her "ever-confident coach" through years of devastating illness. "[T]o make myself 'normal' again would be the most extraordinary feat that I would never quite accomplish," she writes. Now, more than 17 years after her transplant, Silverstein reflects on the often misunderstood journey through "the torments of being saved" in a stirring story of survival and unyielding love. (Oct.)

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Publishers Weekly

Silverstein's autobiography draws readers inside her mesmeric human drama of living life as a heart transplant recipient. Make no mistake: the author, an Ivy League-trained lawyer and superb writer with a wry, biting sense of humor, immediately debunks preconceptions about a transplanted heart as a "cure" for a failed one (she was 24 at the time of the procedure). Indeed, she strips away the layers of her 17-year medical "recovery" and reveals her anger toward the "white coats" (as she refers to her physicians), her desire to one day have some semblance of a "normal" life, and her unshakable love for her husband, Scott, and their son, Casey. Silverstein is a natural raconteur with a story so compelling readers won't want to put this book down. Required reading for anyone involved with patient care and essential for the shelves of all U.S. medical and nursing school libraries; highly recommended for all public, academic, consumer health, and other health science libraries.
—Maura Sostack

Library Journal

A young woman's revealing memoir of life after a heart transplant. Silverstein was a 23-year-old law student when tightness in her chest and episodes of fainting first sent her to her family doctor, who advised her to eat more salt to get her blood pressure up. A year later the same doctor told her she had congestive heart failure and sent her to a cardiologist. After various tests, including a heart biopsy, he told her she had heart muscle damage, presumably from a virus, put her on medication and then referred her to another cardiologist, who sent her to another. The author's keen assessments of her doctors, her confrontations with them, her expectations and disappointments are among the book's best moments. After a near-fatal episode of ventricular fibrillation, Silverstein agreed to a heart transplant, unaware of how it would change her life. Shortly after her 25th birthday she received a healthy 13-year-old heart. She had to take daily medications, including strong immunosuppressives to prevent rejection. "I had made a deal with the Devil," she writes. "In return for one precariously pulsating organ, I would endure a lifetime of poison and all its ill effects." Her attempts to lead a normal life included marrying one year later, finishing law school, practicing law and eventually becoming an adoptive mother. At her wedding, she successfully posed as a healthy bride, but continuing to keep up appearances was extraordinarily difficult. Hospitalizations for invasive tests occurred regularly; infections plagued her weakened and vulnerable immune system. While working to create the impression of health and energy, she often felt nauseated, exhausted and misunderstood. When, after 17 yearsa suspicious lump suggested she might have cancer, she was ready to call it quits. She didn't, however, and the heart that was expected to last no more than a decade has now kept Silverstein alive for 19 years. Sets the record straight about a so-called medical miracle. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger/Janklow & Nesbit

Kirkus Reviews