Authors

Discussion

There exists a breadth of texts by female authors recording their struggles with illness. What distinguishes Izabela Morska’s account of her struggle with Lyme disease in Znikanie [Disappearing, 2019], is how the author negotiates her illness using various texts in English, while living in her native country, Poland. Medical research papers, essays, and stories of illness, become crucial resources to help the author make sense of her undiagnosed and debilitating illness. These texts can be described as “companion texts,” as Sara Ahmed (2017) termed works by others that “might share a feeling or give you resources to make sense of something beyond your grasp.” A closer investigation of these companion texts that Morska draws from in her writing, demonstrates that their role is more than solely to navigate through illness. This paper argues that these texts provide an important feminist, intellectual framework to critique the state of the Polish healthcare system, in particular the dismissive treatment of women by medical professionals. Morska’s investigative memoir adds to important global voices, such as Susan Sontag (1978) and her examination of illness and its symbolisms, while offering an intersectional perspective on the condition of female patients within the Polish healthcare system.