The Beginning of Everything

March 5, 2018
Buchanan (The Gift) chronicles a year of physical and mental anguish in this disturbing memoir of an enigmatic illness. In the midst of a painful divorce from her physician husband of 20 years, Buchanan came down with the flu. In an intense fit of coughing, she tore the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord, causing her cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to leak. Unaware of the damage, she suffered excruciating headaches, brain fog, and a general disruption of her life. Over time, the author met with various doctors with little result; only after traveling from her Philadelphia home to Duke University Hospital in North Carolina did solutions emerge. At the same time, her divorce was finalized. As her medical mystery is cleared up, readers learn about the characteristics of a CSF leak and the difficulties of treatment. Buchanan is uncannily adept at describing pain (she likens the sinus pain to flying in a plane “at that altitude that makes your sinus pressure unbearable”) and charting the snail’s pace of recovery; a former classical pianist, she takes up playing again, her practice becoming a brain-training method. Readers will be fascinated by this introspective medical journey and heartened by the simultaneous healing of a family torn by divorce.