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Lime Disease, Limes Disease, Lyme's Disease, Lymes Disease |
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No Warranties or Representations
Lyme Disease symptoms vary from person to person. (lymes disease lyme's disease lime disease limes disease)
The data and information presented in this web site are presented in good faith and believed to be accurate regarding Lyme disease (commonly misspelled lymes disease lyme's disease lime disease limes disease) and other related diseases. Any and all liability for the content or any omissions including any inaccuracies, errors, or misstatements in such data or information is expressly disclaimed. The web site is compiled for the sole purpose of informing community members of resources and information pertaining to Lyme Borreliosis Disease and its coinfections. Lyme disease symptoms may vary from person to person.
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Consult a qualified Lyme ( Borreliosis ) Disease literate doctor for medical advice if Lyme Disease is suspect to discuss your Lyme Disease Symptoms.
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'Amy Tan knows about suffering, her own and others'
Author of Joy Luck Club completes new novel as she struggles with debilitating illness
Amy Tan, shown in her apartment in New York's Soho area with her dog Bubba, has made mother-daughter relationships and the American immigrant experience themes in her several bestselling novels.
Rhonda Shafner, The Associated Press
Published: Wednesday, January 04, 2006
NEW YORK - Her skin is flawless. It appears particularly luminous on this dark, rainy morning. She is wearing a Mandarin-collared shirt adorned with small metallic Buddhas, a gift from a well-known Hong Kong designer. With her silver bracelets and pendant earrings, Amy Tan looks like she's about to step out for a typical New York evening.
But the best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club, her first collection of interwoven stories, is seated at the kitchen table in her Manhattan loft, sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee and talking about her latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning.
The book is part comical, part supernatural and part political, and concerns a group of American tourists in Burma, or what is now Myanmar. The tale recounts how they handle their abduction by an ethnic minority who believe that one of the Americans has the power to liberate them from the long-reigning military junta's torture, forced labor, relocation and other abuse.
Because Myanmar is one of the worst violators of human rights in the world, Tan was hesitant to travel there to research the book. In the end, though, she decided to go. Like her characters, she went on a guided art tour with friends, starting out in China and continuing on the Burma Road.
But one of the main questions she set out to explore in the novel is: How do we best deal with the suffering of others?
"I realize that at this point in my life, the things that I think about a lot have to do with discomfort, discomfort about what I feel about the suffering of other people, of what I'm supposed to be doing, what I can do, what I can't do, what I don't want to do," she says.
Tan's descriptions of the suffering of the Karen National Union, an ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar, are some of the most deeply felt in the novel. Her wealthy American characters get to see first hand the gross mutilations -- missing limbs and scarred faces -- of people who were forced to test land mines to see if they were still effective. How the Americans respond to the Karen suffering is painfully realistic.
The author's own suffering, from a case of Lyme disease she got in 1999, has helped her empathize with the suffering of others. But hasn't her own painful past -- the deaths of her father and her older brother, managing her mother's depression and the murder of a close friend -- already given her enough understanding of suffering?
"I think," Tan says, "that until you physically suffer and feel helpless and hopeless and wonder who is going to help you and how ... I think that was the turning point," she says of how physical agony can be even worse than the loss of loved ones.
As a result of the Lyme disease, Tan has memory loss, seizures, hallucinations, and at times hasn't been able to walk. The pain in her feet was so terrible that the 53-year-old often could not leave her house. Now she takes anti-seizure medication and antibiotics, gives herself an inter-muscular shot once a week and feels "great."
"Now that I've been treated," she later elaborated by e-mail, "I am doing 120 per cent -- writing and doing things with great energy, taking advantage of the resources of my brain, and writing with a strong look at what is important."
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