Customer Reviews

Fixing Frannie

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I bought this book primarily because I was recently diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis and I was very curious to read a thorough experience of someone else's navigation through the medical care machine to find answers and adequate treatment for this rare disease. Because there is so little written for patients on this disease I was very eager to read about it from another patient's perspective.

However, the majority of the book detailed, at length, the constant indifference and negligence she received at the hands of nearly every doctor the author met (seriously, my heart goes out to this woman as she literally must have encountered some of the worst doctors in the country when it comes to bedside manner). i almost started feeling like she must have developed a persecution complex due to all of this because she seemed to find flaw even in the doctors that she liked...and as another sufferer of mastocytosis I've gone through practically the same journey of failed tests and failed medications, though mine only took 5 years...so maybe that didn't resonate with me because it was overly familiar. I also found her hostility towards doctor's suggestions that there might be a psychological element to her suffering to be very offensive. Yes, like many other she knew she was physically ill, but her language in this book detracts from the fact that depression in and of itself can be a debilitating disease, as can many of the somatoform disorders, without even taking into account that many suffers from chronic illness -do- suffer bouts of depression without needing to be deemed "psychiatric" as if it was a pejorative term.

In general, I feel that if you want to read a book on the failures of the medical system and how to navigate them I would suggest How Doctors Think in addition to, or even over this, simply in terms of technical elegance as well as for the opportunity to see this story written from a different perspective.

If you are looking for information on dealing with or treating mastocytosis from a patient's perspective, there is some in there, but it's very superficial and abrupt when compared to the detail the writer gives to every failed procedure or miserable doctor she had seen. I think in general that is where my disappointment with the book comes from, her failures and unhappiness warranted so much more exposition than the finding and management of her eventual diagnosis.