The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery - Ross Douthat Audiobook

Written by Ross Douthat
Read by Ross Douthat
Format: M4B

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.

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.

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.

“NEW YORK TIMES opinion writer Ross Douthat narrates his affecting audiobook with unusual sensitivity to the world around him and to his emotional reactions to that world. Presenting sentences that often approach the elegance of poetry, his steel-toned voice and conversational cadences connect with his poignant message. The narrative is about his struggle to understand and cope with the rare form of Lyme disease that devastated his functional life and upended his faith in the medical establishment. …. But with wit and inspiring self-awareness, he persevered and discovered within himself a rich layer of resilience, hope, and renewed appreciation for life.”—AudioFile