Fever of Unknown Origin:
A True Tale of Medicine,
Mystery, and Magic
When Judith Ford was 42, she came down with a mysterious illness that landed her in the hospital for most of one summer while doctors struggled to keep her alive long enough to find a diagnosis and a treatment. She recovered after many months but she didn’t get a diagnosis until seven years later.
From Fever of Unknown Origin:
"After my illness and my parents’ deaths I saw, in a way I’d never seen before, that one day, now or later, I was going to lose everything that mattered to me. Everything that was a part of the tangled roots of my life, everything I was attached to, mixed up in, held close, everything I loved. When I paid attention—which I’m certainly not brave enough to do all the time–I saw what a huge risk it is to continue to love the world as strongly and as hungrily as I did. To love the people I loved as deeply as I did..
"At the time I got sick I was a successful psychotherapist with a relatively new second marriage, a full-time clinical practice, and three children, ages twelve, eleven, and eighteen months. I was also a runner, a yoga-practitioner, a dancer, and a writer. Eventually I recovered enough to go home from the hospital and to slowly rebuild my life. It took months for me to wean off the medications and regain all my energy.
"Two years after my summer in the hospital, my mother suffered a massive stroke and was never again able to live outside a nursing home. My father, now living alone in the apartment he had shared with my mother, was in end-stage emphysema and had difficulty with everyday tasks like eating and breathing... " READ MORE
Judith M. Ford
Judith M. Ford is a widely published writer whose short work has appeared in over thirty magazines, including Connecticut Review, Evening Street Review, Southern Humanities Review, and many others. Her work has been nominated three times for Pushcart prizes. She was a psychotherapist for thirty-five years and also taught creative writing in a private elementary school, at the University of Wisconsin Extension, and in a teen runaway shelter. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. MORE
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