Erin Williams's WHAT'S WRONG? deftly examines the hellish landscape of chronic pain

What’s Wrong?: Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine

Writer/Artist: Erin Williams
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Publication Date: January 23, 2024

What do you do when your baseline pain is at the prime of the scale for a non-disabled particular person? For thousands and thousands of disabled individuals who endure from chronic pain, getting acceptable remedy first requires getting physicians to consider that they’re in pain, which is an even bigger and tougher hurdle than it needs to be—particularly for disabled people who find themselves intersectionally marginalized in different methods. Because searching for efficient care requires time, cash, and, usually, inexhaustible dedication, many individuals are edged out of even contemplating reduction for what ails them.

This is the baseline for the 5 individuals whose experiences are chronicles in cartoonist Erin Williams’s new graphic novel, What’s Wrong?: Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, together with Williams’s personal experiences as a recovering addict with debilitating gastroenterological pain. In writing about her personal physique, Williams is susceptible and candid, particularly as she examines the selection of components that led her up to now. Readers who favored her 2019 graphic novel, Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame, can be simply as drawn into this e-book.

But in What’s Wrong?, Williams doesn’t focus solely on her personal experiences with chronic pain and incapacity. She notes that, per the CDC, 20 p.c of Americans (50 million individuals) dwell with chronic pain, “making doctors appointments, shuffling from specialist to specialist, filling script after script, often spending their entire lives without meaningful relief. Most of them are people with uteruses.”

To that finish, Williams additionally spotlights 4 different individuals, whom she talked to for 3 years as she wrote and illustrated What’s Wrong?. Representing an array of genders and ethnicities, these featured describe how Western medication was predisposed to fail them and has finished so spectacularly, however reaching out to different disabled individuals and training self-advocacy has additionally majorly impacted their particular person lives.

Throughout, Williams presents analysis on how sure teams of persons are extra prone to endure from and even die from illnesses than others (learn: white, assigned male at start) with a better probability of contracting these illnesses as a result of the latter are handled extra aggressively and with extra haste. For instance, Jamaican-American Dee was recognized with bladder most cancers after many years of medical doctors insisting her reproductive organs had been inflicting her chronic pain even after a complete hysterectomy and oophorectomy. Even after the tumor in her bladder was eliminated and he or she went via a number of rounds of chemo, her pain continued to worsen and the most cancers ultimately got here again.

Williams notes, “Black people (regardless of gender assigned at birth) and people with uteruses of any race or ethnicity have significantly higher mortality rates for bladder cancer…. According to the American Cancer Society, Black people have the highest mortality rate and shortest survival of any racial or ethnic group for most types of cancer in the United States.”

To accompany these extremely private profiles and supporting analysis about why chronic pain is commonly dismissed as “phantom” or in any other case not as critical as what sufferers report, to the detriment of their high quality and longevity of life, Williams inserts varied illustrated diagrams and graphs in her summary, color-blocked illustration type. The artwork in What’s Wrong? is uncomfortable to take a look at, particularly as a result of of the way it’s interspersed amongst private testimonies which might be arduous to learn with out feeling massive swells of rage and despair. Williams is nice at unflinchingly demanding readers’ consideration, forcing them to acknowledge, soak up, and reconcile the arduous subject at hand.

What’s Wrong? is a superb addition to the rising incapacity rights canon. Not solely does it accurately place dependancy as a medical analysis, fairly than an ethical one, but it surely examines how “miracles” are packaged and bought as medication, surgical procedures, and different fixes that always make issues worse for the majority of sufferers who simply wish to go for a single day with out excruciating pain. It’s informative, descriptive, balanced, and sharp, balancing biting commentary with empathetic profiles and cautious examination of how issues can change for the betterment of all.

Whether you’re model new to the subject of disabled neighborhood constructing and medical gaslighting otherwise you’re well-versed, What’s Wrong? is a wonderful addition to your library that’s value a number of reads.

Final verdict: Buy