The Million-Dollar Misdiagnosis

For nearly fifty years, Suzanne Visser lived with severe lower back pain without knowing its cause. Doctors, specialists, therapists and alternative practitioners offered explanations: posture, childbirth, muscle tension, anxiety, wear and tear, repressed emotion, even the joints in her face. None of them named the condition she had been born with: Bertolotti Syndrome.

By the time the diagnosis finally arrived, the cost of not knowing had been immense - physically, emotionally and financially. Suzanne estimates that approximately $1.2 million had been spent, lost or diverted through decades of misdiagnosis, treatments, equipment, medication, special shoes, lost opportunities and the ordinary economic leakage of chronic pain.

Yet this is not only a story about illness. It is the story of a life built under constraint: a writer who changed languages, a poet, painter, cook, publisher and legal scholar who learned to work in fragments, often lying down, often in pain, and often within windows of only fifteen minutes. Through motherhood, migration, Japan, Australia, law, publishing, art, cooking, friendship and late diagnosis, Suzanne's story asks what can still be made when the body will not co-operate.

The Million-Dollar Misdiagnosis: Living, Writing and Creating with Bertolotti Syndrome is a memoir about chronic pain, medical dismissal, time, creativity and survival. It offers recognition to those still searching for a name for their pain, and a clear-eyed account of how a restricted body can still contain an intellectually and creatively expansive life.