Review: "Notes from a Sickbed" by Tessa Brunton

Notes from a Sickbed by Tessa Brunton
Published November 2022 via Graphic Universe
★★★★

Well before long COVID hit the scene, Brunton got sick in a way that most people didn't understand—chronic fatigue and post-exertional malaise curtailed her plans and consigned her to, mostly, a couch and a bed. For years. Eventually she found ways to reduce some of her symptoms...but that is not this story. Rather, this is the story of those years on a couch and in a bed, working up the energy to do something only to crash the next day.

I suppose this is a story that is just better understood than it would have been just a few years ago (when, say, Brunton was still in chronic-illness limbo). I think it does an excellent job of balancing the boredom of that stuckness, of everything being curtailed just as you're getting going. I am curious about Brunton's choice not to write about those strategies she was eventually able to employ—not sure if that's a matter of "maybe for another book" or a matter of "better but not well and don't want to confuse the two" or something else. I'm also curious about what various medical professionals were saying at the time, and whether any of it was helpful; Brunton doesn't really get into that, except for mentions of things not covered by insurance and the frustrations of not getting better.

It's a timely read. The art style isn't my favourite, but it gets the job done, and it's a really admirable effort at turning an experience that must have been both exhausting and often terribly boring into something not boring.