Amy B. Scher, author of This is How I Save My Life, is guest author today. Her piece does relate to books and libraries, but she has quite a story to tell.
Amy B. Scher is the bestselling author of How To Heal Yourself From Depression When No One Else Can (2021; Sounds True), This Is How I Save My Life (2021 reprint; Gallery Books), and other books about “human-ing and healing.” As an energy therapist, she helps people release emotional baggage to become their happiest, healthiest selves. Amy B. Scher has been featured in CBS, CNN, The Washington Post, Yoga Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Daily News, and more. Amy lives in New York City with her beautiful wife and bad cat. She can be found online at amybscher.com.
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Thank you, Amy.
The pictures of me as a toddler show a spunky kid with only some blonde wisps for hair, but enough books around her to make up for it. I walked, talked, and dreamt about books. When I was old enough to go to school, I consumed as many books from the school library as possible; hitting all the classics. As I got older, I became interested in religion and spirituality, disappearing into aisles of books passed one from seeker to another to another. By the time I was in my late teens, I was almost exclusively reading memoir, my interest piqued by authors who discovered themselves on the pages just as I was.
When in my early 20s I became ill with a mysterious illness, neurological and motor functions made reading and trips to the library infrequent. By the time I was twenty-eight-years-old, I had lived through almost a decade of misdiagnoses, excruciating pain, brain lesions, bone marrow biopsies, blood transfusions, and multiple hospital stays to treat my late-stage, chronic Lyme disease.
But the formal names assigned to my suffering did not begin to convey the actual experience of it. Over the years, there were hundreds of symptoms, some visiting for only days at a time and others making a permanent home in my body. Each of the symptoms has had a part in destroying not only my physical self but the rest of me as well: fierce, full-fledged body aches making it difficult to move and unbearable to stay still; exposed nerves in my limbs firing with pain and no rhythmic pattern to warn when the worst would come; extreme upper body weakness that kept me from lifting my arms above my shoulders; bottomless fatigue so heavy it was too much effort to move my lips and speak; dangerously low blood counts forcing my immunologist’s insistence that I not leave the house.
My bed became my house, filled with snacks I was too nauseas to eat and books I could no longer read. My vision and neurological abilities had rapidly diminished. Save the few books on healing I could skim through when I had enough energy, the only stories that I experienced were the nightmare scenarios I obsessively read about on forums where people shared their experiences. One horror story after another, I became terrified that I’d never heal, never get back to life—especially being able to read to my baby nephew, Zach, the bright spot of my life. Taking forty-four pills a day and deteriorating rapidly, I had already consulted with more than sixty doctors, including the top experts in Los Angeles, the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, and a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. When the best physicians in America labeled my condition incurable and potentially terminal, it was up to me to blaze my own path forward. I thought back to all the books I’d read, the stories of the brave authors who too had to pave their own way.
Then, in a stroke of serendipity, I heard about an experimental stem cell treatment only available in India—which had as much probability of killing me as it did of curing me. I boarded a plane, along with my parents, with no idea of what awaited us.
Through grueling treatment and near-constant doubt, I’ hung on to the threads that connected me to home, hoping they’d be enough to hold me together: the Skype calls where I watch Zach eat mac and cheese and practice saying “pasta” from his high chair, singing him songs, him reading me books.
It was through this treatment in India that I was re-awakened to my health, in part thanks to the physical healing, and in part the reminder of what had been in those books all along: we can seek the answers in others’ stories, but we write our own as we go along. The experience was healing beyond my greatest imagination, helping me to re-discover the girl who was enamored by words and books before she became caught up in what to say, wear, and who to be.
My return home from India was a time of both rapturous joy and absolute uncertainty. My sister had offered to let me move in with her, her husband, and Zach, who was a full-fledged toddler by that time. He and I made up for lost time by doing everything together. We visited playground after playground and had deep conversations over sushi about why restaurants make their tablecloths white. As he grew, so did I. My vision had returned to normal and my brain lesions had healed. We went to the library together, pouring over our choices, promising ourselves we could get more books next time, and then again, and again. Both of my greatest loves were back in my life.
It would be hard to see then just how far my journey would take me—us—as I went on to literally write my story, a memoir published by Simon and Schuster, called THIS IS HOW I SAVE MY LIFE. For me, publication was a milestone of pure joy and satisfaction: I’d lived to tell my own story. Although writing my story is not nearly as brilliant as when Zach’s mom walked into his room one evening to find him holding my memoir and reading it—his own name and story right there on the pages.
