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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/graphic-novel-of-month-puff-of-smoke-sarah-lippett Sarah Lippett’s wonderfully drawn memoir of a serious childhood illness is moving and inspiring Serious illness is a painfully lonely business, especially when the patient is a child, isolated from friends and made absent from school by experiences that really should belong – if they must belong anywhere – to the adult world. In her graphic memoir, A Puff of Smoke, Sarah Lippett tells the story of the illness that struck her as a little girl and with which she lived until she was 18 when it was finally diagnosed and doctors were able to treat it. For obvious reasons, its pages are filled with baffled medics and kind nurses, noisy wards and futile tests, debilitating pain and scary, befuddling drugs. But they also speak of a great loneliness: here is a child who is not only unreachable, even by her devoted parents, but who knows herself to be so. If this doesn’t make you cry, you may be a robot rather than a human being. Her first symptoms are terrible headaches; then she begins to drag one leg as she walks. At her local hospital in Stafford, she is put in an isolation ward while the staff try to work out the cause of her problems – the first time in her life she has ever been left alone. Brain scans are performed, and tests conducted on the fluid in her spine, after which she receives her (mis)diagnosis: she has hemiplegia chorea, an involuntary movement disorder. The drugs she is given for this have terrible side effects, among them urinary infections and hair loss, and naturally they do nothing to alleviate her symptoms. Only many years later, when her father insists on a referral to Great Ormond Street hospital in London, will doctors get to the heart of her condition. It turns out that she has moyamoya, a rare disease that constricts arteries to the brain, may cause strokes, and can only be cured by lengthy brain surgery. Continue reading...
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