The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic

Among the spate of new works chronicling personal experiences of illness, Gallagher’s poignant reconstruction of her debilitating eye disease and baffling diagnosis over the course of nearly two years underscores the pervasive sense of powerlessness she felt at the hands of the medical system. Gallagher, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., is the author of several memoirs about her struggle with her Christian faith (Resurrection, et al.). Once a candidate for the Episcopal priesthood, she infuses her journey with a spiritual disorientation, beginning with the sudden discovery at age 60 of a dangerously inflamed optic nerve (a condition called optic neuritis) that could have resulted in blindness. The illness made her feel as if she “dropped out of the world [she] lived in” and was deposited in a kind of Oz, separated from healthy people by a glass wall, where she had instantly become a part of the suffering unfortunates who she had once prayed for and regarded with patronizing sympathy. Forced to scale back her busy life, Gallagher was also terrified that the strain of taking care of her would alienate her husband of 27 years. Doped up on prednisone (steroids) and sent from specialist to specialist, she finally got a referral to the famed Rochester, Minn., Mayo Clinic, where another round of tests and exams only added layers to a mystifying journey. Gallagher does not dole out easy answers in this somber, reflective work. But she finds the humble, bracing imperative to live in the present. “Task: to be where I am.” (May)