Customer Reviews

Sick Girl

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Amy's illness journey was an interesting one. By all practical/statistical accounts, her life is a profound success story. As a double lung transplant recipient, I can only dream and hope to live as long as Amy has since her heart transplant.
Sadly, the book begins with Amy contemplating stopping her transplant meds as a way of ending "the torture of survival" and leaving behind her saintly husband and beloved son. For her, these 19 years have not been successful, they have been almost unbearable.
It was painful reading this book--I had to put it down often. Amy portrays herself as woman who seems to resent even the idea of looking at the positive side of things. She has locked herself in a mental pattern of self-pity. For example, she lists all of these things she has had to cut out of her life because they are too closely associated with a traumatic medical event. This ranges from certain foods to a certain outfit. To this day, she will not put her hand on her husband's knee when he is driving because it reminds her of a horrible ride to the hospital. This is where I think choice comes into play. In this situation, she has chosen to embrace the trauma instead of embrace the new day. This I find to be extraordinarily tragic.
This is Amy's story and she has a right to tell it as it is. My only fear is for those awaiting transplant and for those who may have been, or will someday be, in the position to donate a loved one's organs and save lives. Please do not think that Amy's story is consistent with what it is for everyone post-transplant. I, for one, am happy to live a shorter life with medical ups and downs--it is worth the trade to be here with those I love.
There are many "sick girls" out there--Amy seems to feel as though she is the only one who knows suffering. There are those who suffer physically but choose not to suffer emotionally and spiritually. I hope someday Amy will embrace this concept and find some peace.

Tiffany Christensen, Author of "Sick Girl Speaks!"

Amy Silverstein's book is compellingly readable...and that's amazing for a first-time writer. Her experience flies in the face of the "miracle transplant recipient" whose life begins after her operation.

There are many, many scenes that will stay with me and much that I learned. I didn't know, for example, that transplant patients MUST take immune-suppressing drugs -- poisons, really -- which leave them susceptible to all kinds of illnesses and cancers. Or that the transplanted heart is really an unnatural one -- so that if someone were to say "boo", it would take minutes before the transplanted heart would begin to race. Ms. Silverstein reveals the good, the bad, and the ugly and she does a great job of setting the record straight.

Who among us would feel "lucky" if we were 24 years old and a high achiever -- only to be told that we had a ten-year life expectancy and that those ten years would be filled with pain? Or that a bride's wedding day would include a rush to the coat check room for a dose of a drug that will surely cause nausea and discomfort for the rest of her reception? This is the brutal reality that Ms. Silverstein reveals.

Although I certainly can glean some of Ms. Silverstein's antipathy toward the doctors, some of it seemed a bit unfair. For example, on first hearing her diagnosis, Ms. Silverstein, by her own description, retreated to the safe haven of a ten-year-old girl -- and a bratty one at that. Perfectly understandable. BUT, later, she becomes angry that the doctor did not sit down with her and reveal everything; in fact, he wrote down that she was "fragile." That is understandable as well. She also becomes angry when her doctors "punt" diagnoses and won't take a firm stand; however, in today's world of malpractice, we've created our own monsters.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who doesn't want their stories sugar-coated. This one shows the author's courage as well as her anger, envy, even nastiness. It's very courageous to expose yourself, warts and all, for the world to see...and at the same time, to inform people about what the life of a transplant recipient is REALLY like.

This was a difficult book to read. In many ways. Having been a cancer patient and having had chronic pain, i know too well how difficult it is to try and "buck up" be the nice patient. I know too well how much disdain doctors, nurses, medical professionals DO have for patients who don't behave in ways they deem acceptable. I have seen the blatant disregard in their expressions when you behave in bad patient mode, so it is no surprise that Amy Silverstein chose to tell her side of what its like to be a "sick girl".

Unfortunately, that's all Amy does. This book is one long Middle finger to the medical community and to all her acquaintances and friends who didn't understand how difficult its been for her to live day to day. Its astounding that she has been able to spend the better part of her adult years with as little self understanding as she had at 24.
Amy is a smart girl yes, but not an emotionally smart one. She never feels the need to search out other ways of thinking, or philosophies, or metaphysics, or anything that would help her stop blaming everyone else. at the very least she needed therapy. Amy took responsibility to stay alive when she was first diagnosed, she made that pact with herself and that IS commendable, but the end result was that she expected the world to cheer and applaud her daily effort , and because they were human, and couldn't, and didn't, we were subject to her book length rant. Its amazing that she was able to escape therapy, that no one forced her to get some kind of emotional insight and help. Saving this woman's body but not addressing her mind was not to her benefit.

I can well imagine how little grace of life is left after consistent illness such as hers, i can, and i do have tremendous sympathy for that. I just don't understand how Anyone could spend 19 years facing that daily and NOT become someone i was interested in reading or knowing or hearing about ever again. Amy Silverstein accomplished that beautifully.
Perhaps the problem i have with this book is that i expected her to have a message. Maybe her point is, exactly that, that we have no right to expect anything from her,and that just surviving has been a feat in itself and the best that she could do.
I think i will choose to think of her with more grace and hope than she has alluded to in her book.

I read this book because I had an uncle who recently passed away due to complications from Type 1 diabetes. During the past few years, he received both a donor kidney (from my mother) and a donor pancreas. He was forced to make some difficult choices and I hoped this book would help me understand how he made those choices and what exactly the consequences were.

Amy loves to proclaim, "My goal was to be normal". I bought that before I read the book; however, about 150 pages in, it occurred to me that her goal was never to be normal. Her goal was to obtain sympathy from the world at large while hiding behind a facade of modest fortitude. There were very few traces of honest strength throughout this book. There were tantrums in doctor offices, awkward and condescending conversations with friends, and a LOT of self-pity.

Please don't get me wrong. I can hardly begin to imagine the difficulty of being a transplant recipient. However, it disappoints me that the author of this book acknowledges maybe once or twice the miracle that is her donor heart (in addition to the miracle that is her DONOR, a young girl who lost her life in a car accident). She seems much more driven to establish just how hard she has it, this fact materializing itself in constant reminders that it would be easier to either refuse the transplant or take her own life post-transplant. She was not given a choice between perfection and death. She was given a choice between LIFE and death. She chose. Now instead of spending her time enjoying her family, she makes those around her cringe with pseudo-empathy.

Believe me, Amy. We know that it is hard. We know that transplants are not cures and that they give rise to a host of other medical problems and struggles. But your life could have ended one gloomy day in your 26th year, without a husband, son, law degree, or published book. Spend a bit more time focusing on the good and you may find yourself more satisfied with the choice you made. If writing this book was therapeutic for you, then great. But don't invite the world to your pity party for financial gain under the pretense that you're going to educate us on being a transplant recipient and then present nothing but immature and seemingly ungrateful blather.

The deal-breaker for me in this book is the author's total inability to process the circumstances of her life. Her description of these circumstances, and her reaction to them (whiny and irritating, as many readers have noted) are amply recorded. But huge and puzzling gaps made me wonder if this woman has learned anything from her life experiences.

For instance, after receiving her grim diagnosis of irreversible heart disease, Amy and her parents embark on a taxi ride during which she is, understandably, wailing and ranting about her fate. Her father explodes in anger, saying he's had enough. He makes the taxi driver stop, whereupon he and her stepmother get out, abandoning her in her despair.

What an astounding betrayal! And yet we never hear how she felt about it. She seems to have a genuine affection for her father and stepmother. But how can that be? The only time she brings the moment up again is when her father weeps at her bedside as the doctors tell her that she needs a heart transplant. "I felt desperate to escape his anguish," she writes, "just the way he had been driven to escape mine when he fled from the taxi in Boston." Odd family dynamics, and yet totally unexamined.

After that omission, the author's lack of insight became glaring. She brushes off her sister's heart troubles so that she can return to her own drama. She portrays her husband as a virtual saint rather than a real person. If they ever had a searingly honest conversation about the hand life dealt them, it's not recorded here. She hints that maybe he's had a hard time of it, too, but we don't hear about his howling moments. Surely he's had them. His anger at her tantrums in doctors' offices seems hard-hearted when recorded at the start of the book, but entirely understandable by the end of it.

In one hospital scene, two nurses offer her sympathy and acknowledge the immensity of her struggle, something she repeatedly claims to want, and yet her reaction is this: "Their sympathy was all I needed to dry my tears and turn self-pity into resentment faster than I could blow my nose." Why? Why does she say she wants understanding, and yet react in anger when she receives it?

Toward the end of the book, she says "anyone close should have known that many years of built-up emotion was about to explode inside me" and she sighs that she wishes her husband could know her "in a way that might be impossible." How could anyone know her? She actively prevents people from knowing her, so any real connection she might have with another human being is improbable. Sadly, Amy is not only a sick girl, but a very lonely one too.

The one statement that rang true for me in this book is the author's observation that it is not easy to make the leap from being a healthy person to being a very sick one, and that the longer you live without making this transition, the better off you are. I will take that word to heart, and be thankful for every healthy day I have remaining on this earth.

Wow... as a transplant patient myself, I find this book discouraging and irritating. I wish I hadn't been so curious to hear about a fellow trasplant patient's adventure, and I also wish I knew how cynical and biased this was going to be because then I could have spent the time it took to read this doing something actually worthwhile.
Other than the contemptuos tone that really had the effect of bringing down my day (so much so that I felt compelled to write a review and save others from a similar fate), the writing was lackluster, immature, and really just annoying. A definite waste of time and money. Please don't believe much of what this book says.. it's one pessimist's ungrateful, one-sided account of a life-saving event....
hmm maybe I should write a better one? haha

Amy Silverstein's memoir of her life as a heart transplant recipient was both compelling and repellant. This book was utterly captivating and intriguing from cover to cover. But I have to confess that much of the compulsion to continue reading it was because I felt such antipathy for the author. Amy Silverstein has somehow managed to portray herself as the most unsympathetic character in medical literary history.
Everything that happens to her must be blamed on someone else's failure. The reader is constantly, painstakingly reminded that every moment of the author's life since her transplant has been a heroic triumph of her own personal will that has gone unappreciated and under-celebrated by her family, friends (one wonders that she has any!) and, especially, her doctors. Poor, sick Amy! Nobody has ever given her enough of the fawning attention she knows she deserves. Her tone is alternately hostile and... hostile. The reader is tranfixed more by her unapologetic belief that she is- or ought to be- the center of everyone else's universe than any admiration that she has overcome such long odds.
This book is not so much about Amy Silverstein's heart as about her unwitting revelation that she never had one in the first place.

At 37 I developed heart failure, and at 48 developed CHF. I thouroughly experienced doctors incompetence, and would have been dead and buried 8 years ago if I had not taken my health care into my own hands. Yes, I went through some profound anger, both at the doctors and at my prospect of dying, but somewhere in the journey I had to begin taking another path. I still have bouts of anger at times when in another health crisis, but mostly I have found a peace and happiness I never had before in my life. Although there are things I would like to be able to do, I generally accept my limitations, and where possible I work to expand my abilities. I know there will never again be the so called "normal" life, but I work to make life the best I can, and change my perspective about the rest. Course I know I am not 20 something. I cannot imagine going through this at that age. But, by 17 years into this I think ya got to let go of a lot of the negative, and work on more of the positive of life. I must say, that my most personal growth has come out of living with this, and facing death. Now I appreciate life whole-heartedly, and deal day by day, and issue by issue with the health problems as they come. I (can) imagine living so negatively as Amy, cause I once was there, but I could not imagine living the rest of my life that way, so I made a decision to change that course. And, I am so thankful I did!

What a sad story. Given her background, Amy was ill-equipped to deal with difficulty- never mind sudden illness and the challenges that follow a transplant. As an example of her family dynamics, Amy expresses her fear and anger after finding out about her illness- and her father promptly stops the cab and leaves! Toward the end of the book Amy finds out- 17 years AFTER the transplant, that her husband was afraid (duh!).

When I heard about this book, I thought it would be powerful- living 19 years after a heart transplant with a husband and a child has to be an uplifting story of great courage and hope, right? I was wrong. Unfortunately, this poor woman is emotionally stunted and chooses to spend her life feeling sorry for herself, torturing others and belaboring what she lost. Most of the time I was reading the book, I just felt angry. I can only hope for Amy that something in her future life's path will help her see the joy in living and all the opportunities for personal growth that come with illness (IF you choose to acknowledge them).

If someone is interested in learning about the negatives related to illness or transplant, this may be a good read. If someone is seaking a mentor/guide through the mental and emotional challenges of illness, I would highly recommend the book "Sick Girl Speaks" by Tiffany Christensen. I think Tiffany's book "Sick Girl Speaks" provides a great, constructive and hopeful model for patients, family members and medical professionals alike.

I was intrigued by the lack of insight or growth experienced through Amy's ordeal. The constant self pity and victim mentality made a well written informative book very hard to read.

I have dealt with chronic illness for over twenty years, and have mourned the loss of "normal" functioning. I have dealt with abusive doctors, people and family who have judged me, not understood and ignored it all. I understand what it is like to lose one's health at such an early age, and I only have empathy for Amy.
I was dumbfounded though that her book only focused on the dark side of her experience. The loss of health at such a young age is devastating, yet can also open doors for true growth and inner healing. "Sick Girl" only focuses on the "sick girl".

I had read an article with Amy, where she expressed thankfulness for her life. If this is true, she does not express any of these feelings in her book. This is Amy's story, and she can only tell her story the way she sees it.

The picture on the cover, showing her scar with the title "sick Girl " over it, says it all. This book is overflowing with victim consciousness and self pity. I know that through what Amy did live through and continues to live through, she is anything but the victim she portrays herself to be. She is a strong, courageous powerful woman. I wish perhaps that she could see herself that way.

A very informative, well written book about transplants. I would not recommend it as an inspirational book.