Enemy Within by Karen Ager: book review

Enemy Within (2010) is the memoir of Karen Ager, diagnosed with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Mostly known as an older person’s auto-immune disease, Ager was diagnosed at the age of 17. Rheumatoid arthritis is a painful and chronic inflammation of the joints, mainly knuckles, knees, and hips, causing severe swelling and loss of movement. At its worst, it can inflame the lungs and membrane around the heart, resulting in death. It affects more women than men. Treatments such as physical therapy, nutrition, painkillers, steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs can bring some relief to sufferers but they rarely stop the destruction of the joints.

In her 40s, Ager starts her memoir on the day at the beach when the pain gripped her body. This is her story of growing up in Australia, with her older brother and parents, continuously looking for a cure, or at the least, some relief for the pain. Fighting to mask the pain, she tells how it affects her relationships with her parents, with boyfriends, and at work.

It’s not until she travels to New York that she finds love, reconnects with her parents, settles into a job teaching at the United Nations International School, and comes to terms with the deformity of her limbs, operation scars, and her pain. Her memoir details how she reaches that point, after many setbacks.

Part autobiography, part diary, Ager kept notes along her journey of the days and weeks – that stretch to years – of being stricken, unable to stand, move, or grip anything, to days when she had the energy to take her next step. It also tells a little of other people’s reactions to her disease, some understanding and some not – with most not knowing her secret suffering. Sometimes too sentimental, but nevertheless it chronicles her determination to have a life, and how she reached personal acceptance after thirty years.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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