Rain on a Distant Roof

Rain on a Distant Roof takes readers inside the frightening but fascinating world of Lyme disease in Canada. This is the story of one woman's struggle to understand the disease that's destroying her body and mind. Armed with a confusing diagnosis, a baffling array of symptoms, and a body that's filled with diabolical bacteria, she sets out to unravel the mysteries of her malady. Along the way, she discovers challenges in properly diagnosing and treating the illness, deficits in medical testing, conflicts among medical guidelines, and a public health response that is, at best, problematic. She also discovers the bizarrely intelligent bacteria at the bottom of it all, an organism so complex and perplexing that more than 30 years after it was first discovered, researchers are still having trouble nailing it down.

But time is running out. By 2020, it's estimated that more than 80 percent of the population of Canada will be living in regions that are endemic for Lyme disease and the numbers of people infected with the illness are expected to soar. What remains unknown about the illness continues to trump what is known, placing the health of Canadians increasingly at risk. Welcome to Lyme disease in Canada. Don't go into the woods today.

Vanessa Farnsworth has published more than 100 columns and articles (including several on Lyme disease) in national and regional publications, includingCanadian Gardening, Canadian Living, Cottage, Garden Making, The Creston Valley Advance, The Grower, Harrowsmith Country Life, Kootenay Life East, Route 3, andVitality Magazine. She holds a degree in English from Toronto's York University, a diploma in print journalism from Oakville's Sheridan College, and she studied creative writing at The Humber School for Writers. Her literary fiction has been published in journals across Canada and in the United States, including The Dalhousie Review, dANDelion, The New Quarterly, PRECIPICe, Qwerty, andReed Magazine.