Bent but Not Broken

A book review of Bent But Not Broken: Living Boldly with Chronic Pain by Sigrid MacDonald

Stars: ****

Self-Published (2025)
Memoir>Health
160 pages

Disclosure: I received this book in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links.

Summary: Following a head-on collision with a drunk driver 44 years ago, Sigrid Macdonald has lived with chronic pain. She had her knee replaced in 2024, hoping she could take long walks after dinner and relieve a significant amount of pain in that joint because she’d had a successful hip replacement previously. That didn’t happen. The knee surgery was a failure, and it blew up her life. Now she lives with extreme pain in her left leg, has great difficulty walking even on a walker, and had to give up her apartment to go into independent living. Bent but Not Broken, written with a quirky sense of humor and filled with footnotes and medical research on living with chronic conditions and taking multiple medications, is the raw, authentic story of Sigrid’s accident and knee replacement and how she rebuilt her life after surgery. Although this story is geared toward readers who experience chronic pain, it will appeal to anyone who has undergone severe loss or adversity of any kind with tips and tools for how to change what you can and radically accept what you can’t so as to optimize your physical and mental health

I read this book in one sitting, not just because it’s shorter but because it was interesting and I could identify with a lot of it (chronic pain.) She talks a lot about a knee replacement and that’s something that is probably in my future so I really wanted to see what went wrong for her.

I will say her knee replacement story might scare you if you are awaiting a knee replacement but it’s important to read the whole book to see the reasons it might have gone so wrong for her and she offers advice near the end to help you decide if it’s right for you or not. I appreciate that she doesn’t just say don’t do it despite her experience, but that she realizes it’s different for everyone.

The end of the book she gives a large list of things to try for chronic pain and why you shouldn’t give up on them even though they are simple. She also answers questions about her book and situation.

This book was helpful for two reasons:

I felt heard as a chronic pain warrior, I’m not alone.
I was given something to think about when deciding if a knee replacement is right for me.

Buy Bent But Not Broken at Amazon.com