4 ideas
As a college student at Harvard around age 21, Sarah Manguso developed chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), in which her immune system stripped the myelin from her nerves and caused numbness that spread into paralysis. Over years of relapse and remission she was treated with repeated plasmapheresis through a central line and with steroids.
Acute illness supplies a structure of urgency, treatment schedules, and a clear enemy that holds a person together. When the physical threat recedes, that scaffolding disappears and the psychological damage the illness deferred can surface. The end of the disease is therefore a period of high risk, not simply a return to health.
In autoimmune disease the attacker and the attacked are the same body, so the patient cannot locate the enemy outside herself or fully trust her own sensations. This removes the usual story of fighting an invader and replaces it with an unresolvable internal split. The body becomes an unreliable narrator of its own condition.
Long illness breaks lived time into repetitive procedures, hospital stays, and blank stretches, so memory survives as isolated vivid shards rather than a continuous plot. Telling the story in brief, discontinuous paragraphs reproduces that texture honestly, where a smooth arc would impose false coherence on the experience.