ARE WE FEELING BETTER YET?WOMEN SPEAK ABOUT HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA
ed. Colleen McKee and Amanda Crowell Stiebel
I highly recommend this collection of personal essays about women's encounters with life-changing medical treatments and bodily crises. [The contributors] bring an acute awareness to their accounts of struggles with illness and the medical establishment. In memoirs that are alternately irreverent, despairing, pugnacious, and affirming, they explore the pain, frustration, and triumph of claiming their own bodies, sometimes with support from the healthcare system and sometimes by defying it. --Kathy Gentile, Director of the Institute for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis
Gather round this sister circle. No sideways glances of accusations of hysteria here. In its light, truth to power is allowed to thrive and your voice allowed to soar. Are We Feeling Better Yet? is exactly what a woman taking charge of her life needs to have in her arsenal. --Michelle Sewell, Founder and publisher, GirlChild Press
What kind of health care are we getting for the billions of dollars we are spending in the United States? It depends a lot on who you are, where you live, what kind of insurance you have (if any), and how determined you are to get the care you need from the heath providers you encounter on any particular day. That's the unvarnished truth that emerges from this fine collection of often-penetrating personal essays by American women. You'll cry along with the new mother struggling to understand the mysteries of breastfeeding her first child while medical experts offer contradictory advice. You'll feel the outrage of a woman who, as an uninsured immigrant, experiences the indignities of a public health clinic where pregnant women are forced to stand in line for hours. You'll feel the shame of a young woman whose diagnoses of HPV means she might have to tell her parents she has had premarital sex. And you'll share the relief of a woman whose sudden grave illness is expertly diagnosed as meningitis and promptly treated by doctors at a local hospital. Health policymakers debating how to reform our system should read these stories first! --Lois Uttley, MPP, Co-founder, Raising Women's Voices for the Health Care We Need
Dear Readers: Beware of this blurb! Its enthusiastic recommendation of this book has been written by an undeniably biased woman whose thoughts and opinions can be traced directly to a life lived under the powerful influences of gender inequality, mental illness, obesity, financial insecurity, aging parents, dying siblings, long periods (years and years) of playing the health care lottery forced upon the uninsured, and, oh, a predilection for good literature. You too? Then, in the words of Emily Dickinson, 'there's a pair of us.' And you will see from this wise and compelling anthology that there are many more of us. Not you? No matter. The reach of this book is wide. The stories told within it will touch any one of us who has experienced some struggle in the act of staying alive. Read this book and give it to everyone you know who cares about the changes of perception and policy that need to be made in order for all of us to start feeling better. --Kathleen Finneran, author of The Tender Land: A Family Love Story
