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A review by half_book_and_co
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System by Sonya Huber
5.0
"Pain Woman Takes Your Keys. And Other Essays From a Nervous System" made me think, wonder, and laugh - but most of all I recognized myself and some of my experiences in this book in a way I had not before. In her essays, Huber writes about her experiences with chronic illness and pain, looks at the (US) health system, analyzes common discourses on health/ illness and asks what pain actually is/ means/ does. The tone changes from poetical to outright snarky, the form from essay to open letters and lists. I loved this variety for it also stands in for the different approaches to and experiences of pain.
Huber looks at how the health system and health providers often fail chronic pain patients (i.e. by not taking women in pain serious, by focusing on the possibility of pain med addiction, by using pain scales which do not provide any insight), but she also writes about the difficulty to free oneself from certain ideas of productivity/ parenthood/ how life is supposed to be, sexuality or the lack thereof and social media representations of life with chronic pain/ illness.
Of course, the book cannot discuss all these aspects in an exhaustive way in its 180 pages, but Huber maps out a huge field of what we could consider when discussing pain. The essay collection thus is a great starting point.
Huber looks at how the health system and health providers often fail chronic pain patients (i.e. by not taking women in pain serious, by focusing on the possibility of pain med addiction, by using pain scales which do not provide any insight), but she also writes about the difficulty to free oneself from certain ideas of productivity/ parenthood/ how life is supposed to be, sexuality or the lack thereof and social media representations of life with chronic pain/ illness.
Of course, the book cannot discuss all these aspects in an exhaustive way in its 180 pages, but Huber maps out a huge field of what we could consider when discussing pain. The essay collection thus is a great starting point.