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= The Brand New Catastrophe = The Brand New Catastrophe is a medical memoir by Michael Scalise. It describes his experience after discovering he suffered from acromegaly, and how he later deals with hypopituitarism as a result of an apoplexy of the pituitary gland. In the memoir, Scalise documents his life before and after he was diagnosed.

Plot Summary
At the age of 24, Mike goes into an emergency room in Brooklyn with what he thought was a migraine, only to realize that he had been suffering from acromegaly and had experienced a pituitary apoplexy. As a result he is left him with a hormonal deficiency. After returning home from the hospital Mike deals with the dramatic changes that the disease has brought him including taking supplemental hormones, finding an insurance that will cover the maintenance of his disease, redefining his identity and dealing with the new impediments of the disease in his relationships with his girlfriend, his friends, his mother and other members of his family.

PART ONE
Chapter 1 The Drowning Lifeguard: Mike’s relationship with his mother is introduced as she expresses how worried she was during his stay at the hospital. Mike's humor against the situation he was in at the hospital made his mother question if he was enjoying the tragic occurrence he was going through. Mike flashbacks to his junior year in high school where he was asked during his physical education class to do an underwater swim of 62.5 yards and he almost drowns. He related his almost death experience to his recently discovered tumor and compares his mother’s reaction to both circumstances.

Chapter 2 More Recent Unfinished Business: Mike describes his relationship with Loren before his apoplexy. He explains how their relationship had been long distance during the years they were away in college and that he had recently moved to New York to live together.

Chapter 3 Q&A: Mike puts the pieces together as he is asked about the symptoms of acromegaly. He reflects about the times he has experienced a lack of sleep, joint and nerve pain, and sweating among other typical symptoms of the disease.

Chapter 4 The Big Whatever: Mike’s doctor discusses the signs of acromegaly in front of Loren and Mike’s parents. Mike’s mother feels guilty for having noticed something odd about his face during a family meeting some months prior to the rupture and not having done anything about it.

PART TWO
Chapter 5 In the Event of Something Unholy: Mike is invited to a friend’s wedding in Pittsburgh, his hometown, and he insists to Loren that they must attend even though he was recently released from the hospital. For the first time, Mike shows to be treating his disease as one of the defining factors of his identity.

Chapter 6 A Few Simple Repairs: Mike’s health is improving, but once again at a party, he jokes about his experience as a way to make people interested in him. At a job interview he brings up his tumor as a last resource to get the manager’s attention but he fails to get the job.

Chapter 7 Box-o’-Man: Mike talks about emails he receives from his father of adult magazines as a way of his father offering support with his now new lack of testosterone.

Chapter 8 Posse: Mike talks about different famous figures who had acromegaly and how it is portrayed in the media. He refers to André the Giant as "the patron saint of acromegaly".

Chapter 9 Another One: Mike deals with self-confidence problems as he is trying to find someone that confirms that the disease has changed his looks.

PART THREE
Chapter 10 Bait: Mike creates what he calls "baits" to induce people around him to ask about his disease. He is advised to receive Gamma Knife treatment for residual tumor from the apoplexy in Pittsburgh.

Chapter 11 What Else Can She Give But  Her Milk?: Mike goes back to Pittsburgh for his treatment, and his brother accompanies him to an MRI at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He finds out that his mom is having her fourth surgery.

Chapter 12 Gamma Knife: Mike explains the procedures of the Gamma Knife treatment and how he felt around the staff at the hospital.

PART FOUR
Chapter 13 A Certain Kind of Busy: Mike gets a job writing instruction manuals at a children's publisher and finally has health coverage at work. He also finds a part-time job writing trivial questions. He becomes less communicative of the stories from the hospital and his disease.

Chapter 14 The Most Literal Possible Understanding of the World: It has almost been one year since Mike's rupture and after his visit to the doctor he decides to stop taking his testosterone supplements without asking his physician. He explains his experience without the hormone and how his view of everything around him was affected as a result.

Chapter 15 Game: Mike tries finding symptoms of acromegaly in people he sees in public places. He wonders if those people have the disease and if they know they have it.

Chapter 16 What Okay Feels Like Now: Loren and Mike have been living together for two years and decide to get married. Mike's doctor says the stress from wedding might cause him an Adrenal crisis. She recommends that he gets a medical bracelet. Mike's mom is in need of another surgical procedure.

Chapter 17 Best Man: The wedding is approaching and Mike's high school friend Stibner is in town for the after event celebrations.

Chapter 18 Wedding: Loren and Mike get married at the city hall. Mike's mom is still recovering from her last procedure, but he notices she looks sick. After all the stress from the wedding, Mike sleeps for 16 hours.

PART FIVE

Chapter 19 Jewelry: Mike and Loren move to Washington, D.C., where Loren gets a new job and he starts graduate school. Mike starts seeing a new doctor and is given the news that the blood tests show progress from the Gamma Knife radiation. The doctor tells him he must buy the medical jewelry.

Chapter 20 Yacht People: Mike's parents have the dream of buying a yacht and go to DC to look for models to buy.

Chapter 21: A History in Caricature: The doctor tells Mike his tumor is gone. Mike starts to feel strange talking about his tumor; he says it felt "forced and alien".

PART SIX

Chapter 22 Perhaps Nothing, Perhaps Everything: Mike briefly narrates the next seven years of his life now that the tumor is completely gone. He narrates how his body cannot handle everyday stress due to his inability to produce enough cortisol. After contemplating all the risks of not having an emergency bracelet, he finally gives in to the idea of wearing the bracelet, which said:"'ADRENAL INSUFFICIENCY""STEROIDS""MIKE SCALISE'"Chapter 23 Crazy Lady: After the results from a blood test come back, Mike is told his cholesterol levels are "astronomical". This new discovery finally brings Mike and his mother to a better place in their relationship where they no longer compete to be the "better sick person".

Chapter 24 Practice: Mike's mother has an accident fixing the boat's machinery and breaks two ribs. Mike's father decides to sell the boat.

Chapter 25 A Universe of No Accidents: Mike finally defeats his experience in the hospital as he explains how he now chooses what part of his story he talks about. He and his mother can finally laugh at the stories from the times they have been hospitalized.

Mike
Being a memoir, Mike is the main character of the story and the narrative is told from his perspective. His character evolves during the story as he transitions from creating his identity around the disease he has suffered to finally accepting it as a part of him that does not necessarily defines who he is. In this story, he must confront dealing with the symptoms of having a hormonal deficiency and the effects this has on his everyday life.

Mike's Mother
Mike's mother is one of the most prominent characters in the story as she is Mike's competitor in being the "better sick person". Across the narrative Mike's mother is hospitalized multiple times becoming the person that can better understand what he goes through while confronting the disease.

Loren
Loren is Mike's girlfriend since high school and after they go away to college they maintain a long distance relationship. During the time that Mike suffered the rupture, he had just moved in to live with her in New York City. She is Mike's partner in dealing with the disease and they get married two years after his hospitalization. In the chapter called "Jewelry," Mike expressed that "my illness had become our illness, had matured into a thing we'd both learn to contend with as a unit" as he refers to Loren.

Themes
One of the main themes exposed in this book is the effect of disease on a patient's identity. Mike's character is the perfect mirror of this topic as he shows development of his perspective through each one of the six parts of the book. Other themes include how relationships are shaped by illness such as Mike's relationship with his mother and Loren. Moreover, the topic of healthcare in the United States is also touched upon as Mike seeks to find a job that will have a health coverage convenient for his condition.

Reception
The book has received positive comments for its use of humor in narrating such a tragic experience. Some of the reviews include:

“The effects of illness on self-image and its gravitational pull on family, friends, and spouse are touchingly detailed in this upbeat health memoir.”-Booklist review

"His way is with humor, optimism, courage and probing introspection, the very characteristics -- combined with crisp prose and a rare and innately interesting medical condition -- that make this a winning literary debut." -The New York Times Book Review

"The enemy combated by Mike Scalise in his memoir The Brand New Catastrophe isn’t really his rare brain tumor—like most modern health crises, that battle is fairly mundane and drawn-out. Instead, Scalise takes it upon himself to wage war against the affirmative clichés of the illness memoir itself, turning each episode of his treatment and long, bewildering convalescence into a separate arena in a fight against sick lit’s prescriptive vapidity."-Pete Tosiello