Thinking of Fleeing to the Country to Beat the Crises of the Times? It would be wise to listen to Ross Douthat’s experiences first! Lyme Disease. (With Rod Dreher and Kale Zelden.)

One must be prepared. And educated in country living. “In this vulnerable, insightful memoir, the [Catholic] New York Times columnist tells the story of his five-year struggle with a disease that officially doesn’t exist, exploring the limits of modern medicine, the stories that we unexpectedly fall into, and the secrets that only suffering reveals. His harrowing account opens up spaces for rethinking what we think we know, the limitations of official accounts, and the deep mysteries of the buffered and porous self.

See the interview about the horrors we human beings can go through below. Remember the Patriarch Job? Where is God in it all?

See video interview below

And what about the Plum Island, Massachusetts Biowarfare experiments there and Lyme Disease? You’ll have to get the book or Audible version to get into this aspect.

“A powerful memoir about our fragile hopes in the face of chronic illness.”—Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason.

In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, D.C., to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain–a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which according to CDC definitions does not actually exist: the chronic form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of tens of thousands of people but has no official recognition–and no medically approved cure.

From a rural dream house that now felt like a prison, Douthat’s search for help takes him off the map of official medicine, into territory where cranks and conspiracies abound and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment and experiment on themselves. Slowly, against his instincts and assumptions, he realizes that many of the cranks and weirdos are right, that many supposed “hypochondriacs” are victims of an indifferent medical establishment, and that all kinds of unexpected experiences and revelations lurk beneath the surface of normal existence, in the places underneath.

The Deep Places is a story about what happens when you are terribly sick and realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat you can only do so much. Along the way, Douthat describes his struggle back toward health with wit and candor, portraying sickness as the most terrible of gifts. It teaches you to appreciate the grace of ordinary life by taking that life away from you. It reveals the deep strangeness of the world, the possibility that the reasonable people might be wrong, and the necessity of figuring out things for yourself. And it proves, day by dreadful day, that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and that even in the depths there is always hope.”

Get the book and / or listen on Audible

See also the Matt Lewis interview with Ross Douthat on the subject of his shocking, long illness