The Million-Dollar Misdiagnosis

For nearly fifty years Suzanne Visser lived with severe lower back pain without knowing its cause. Doctors, specialists, therapists and alternative practitioners offered explanations: posture, childbirth, muscle tension, anxiety, wear and tear, repressed emotion, even the joints in her face. None of them named the condition she had been born with, Bertolotti Syndrome.By the time the diagnosis arrived, the cost of not knowing was immense. She estimates that about $1.2 million was spent, lost or diverted through decades of misdiagnosis, treatments, equipment, medication, special shoes, lost opportunities and the ordinary economic leakage of chronic pain.The book is also the story of a life built under constraint: a writer who changed languages, a poet, painter, cook, publisher and legal scholar who learned to work in fragments, often lying down, often in windows of fifteen minutes. Through motherhood, migration, Japan, Australia, law, publishing, art, cooking and friendship, it asks what can still be made when the body will not co-operate.It is written for readers still searching for a name for their pain, and for anyone who wants an account of how a restricted body can hold an expansive intellectual and creative life.