Tell Me Where It Hurts

After years of pain that’s only getting worse following a sledding accident, tired of bleeding money on specialists and tests and getting no answers, Gail Waetje discovers Oxycontin, the only solution she’s found for dulling the feeling of knives serrating her spine and—and likes it. Maybe a little too much.

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Its Thanksgiving break, and half of Walla Walla is already on the hill. Finally, it’s Gail’s turn in “the whip,” the last in a long line of snow saucers. As she pushes off the ground, centipede style, she notices the snow has begun to crust. Seconds later, an accident has her spraying the snow with vomit.



For more than ten years following that fateful day, Gail searches for a diagnosis for her chronic, acute back pain, bleeding money on specialists, tests, and pills—until, one day, her physician bursts in the room pushing a new wonder drug: Oxycontin. Gail follows her doctor’s orders, like the good girl her mother raised her to be, until she hits what her mother would later call “a bad patch.” (Gail would call it a five-year chain of life-changing events that pried her fingers off the will to live.)



Tell Me Where It Hurts is an “if we didn’t laugh, we’d cry” memoir that divides Gail’s story between three houses on a farm she’s never left. Her parent’s ranch house births an eating disorder. Her grandmother’s farmhouse is where the pain begins. But it’s a used doublewide with a widening crack down the middle where the wheels, literally and figuratively, fall off.