Days behind again.  Hospitalization taking longer to recover from than I optimistically anticipated.  And our selection, Called Back – My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life,  took longer to read and digest than most other cancer narratives we have covered.  This is, we observe in her on-line interview, part of what author, Mary Cappello, intended.  In that interview she talks about the more typical form of cancer narrative as being “culturally prescribed”.  She notes a certain sameness being offered up whether as a breast cancer blog, self-help advice, or traditional text.  She likened these messages as to narrative Muzak, a restive background mix of moralizing and sentimentality.  Cappello set out to offer readers a different “set of tones.”

Two factors seem to guide Cappello’s story.  One, she is an academic and part of a feminist/intellectual tradition.  Second, her sexual identify as a lesbian has informed her cancer experience.  Although she is a professor of English and Creative Writing, she places her line of thinking under the broader category of semiotics, “the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols…”

It is this focus which slows her narrative down into a kind of deconstruction that stops to analyze the various rituals and texts that codify entrance into the world of cancer and its treatment.  And it is this approach to her experience that makes Cappello’s narrative stand out from others, offering, as mentioned, “a different set of tones.”

“That I have cancer is not new, but it’s news to me….It’s been with me for years, but now it is announcing itself.  What’s new is that it’s readable.  My cancer has become legible.  But evidently it’s been happening, in its own way, silently residing for a long, long time.”

This is a woman who takes Proust (Swann’s Way) to treatment with her and weaves his various ideas about the “anesthetizing influence of habit” into her own approaching encounter with breast cancer surgery, breaking up her own story with periodic Proustian quotations.

“There is no verb in the English language for how a body is forced to comply inside an MRI machine.  “Lolling’ doesn’t convey anxiety’s mutations there, though it does begin to broach the ridiculous suspension of two breasts displayed downward in holes cut in the table.  You lie on your stomach attached to everything and nothing, to the whoosh of air, to a lit tunnel, dark on either end:  you hang onto the movement of your own breathing, knowing if you continue to breathe too fast you’ll dissolve.”

Later she reflects that her surgeon, who had placed her own gloved hands so intimately inside the author’s body in order to gain a palpable sense of diseased nodes, will later rarely even offer the most casual brush of her hand.  Cappello continues to dissect the minutia of her experience, much like her Proust.

I will be interested in hearing you reactions to this interesting book.  The author has hinted that she may join the discussion.  Please read the third chapter, on chemotherapy, for next week.

Settling into the middle third of Kelly Corrigan’s cancer memoir, the balance of back story and current events seems to be shifting toward the cancer story.  At this point, of course, the narrative devotes itself both to Kelly’s breast cancer as well as her father’s cancers – his bout with prostate cancer years earlier and the discovery of his bladder cancer, occuring concurrently with Kelly’s chemo treatment.  One flashback, however, sheds new light on Kelly’s character.  She travels alone to Australia, works as a nanny, making side trips to New Zealand, Thailand, and Fiji.  Only later do we, and she, discover that during her trek, her father is diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer.  Not wanting her to alter her travel plans and return to be at her father’s side, the family decides not to tell Kelli until after she is back home.  There is also the suggestion that her presence during this crisis would negatively add to the family drama

Later she makes another trip, a real trek, to the undeveloped wonders of distant Nepal.  These travels may reveal the more positive and reaffirming aspects of her relationship with her dad, “Greenie” or the “Green Man”, the moniker he has bestowed upon himself.  The confidence that must enable a young, middle class American woman to travel remote areas of the globe can surely be tracked back to her upbringing.  As we discussed last week, she is keenly aware of the effect of her father’s magnanimous personality on her eventual identity.  “He defined me, as parents do.”

With much of the drama being focused on her involvement with her father’s illness, chapters about Kelly’s own battle almost fade into the background.  There are not without eloquence.  She discusses the particular difficulties with chemo therapy, describing them as a combination of pain and fear.  In a scene in which her younger daughter awakens crying at night against her own pain of teething,  Kelly’s mother/survivor instincts emerge.  She lifts the child from her crib to comfort her.  “…when you are in pain, and you see someone else in pain, there is really nothing as satisfying as giving them comfort in the night.  I hold her for a long time, in the dark, like sisters in a forest.”

If this is Kelly’s strongest instinct, it sheds like on her later frustration and angst when her father is diagnosed with bladder cancer.  The author is restrained in California by the necessities of her treatment plan.  Her aging father is across the country, the family there seeming to wander the medical morass without a sense of direction or advocacy.  Kelly’s urge is to rescue, to orchestrate her father’s care by telephone, email, and the internet.  Her anxiety swells.  “I am at odds with everyone, and it is making me lonely.  My most special person is dying, and no one is doing anything right.”

This sets the stage for the last section of the book.  Dare we judge Kelly’s emotional dependence on her father?  As presented Greenie is one of those rare individuals that people gravitate to.  His gift was “making people feel irreplaceable.” No one else in her life quite compares with her father, not even her husband, Edward, as he himself confesses one lonely night.  So coupled with her strong paternal bound is also that special feeling of comraderie that we cancer survivors feel for one another.  This is part of the impulse and strength of the whole cancer blogging phenomenon, different perhaps than the more general blogging community that might be seen as more “self-focused.”

Reading Assignment: finish reading “The Middle Place”.  Focus on Kelly’s relationship with her father and her identification with his cancer struggle.

The Middle Place from Amazon

Kelly & George

“The thing you need to know about me is that I am George Corrigan’s daughter…” So begins this dual-cancer narrative by Kelly Corrigan, a professional writer amd a breast cancer survivor.  In the book she will intertwine the stories of her own cancer as well as her father’s concurrent battle with late-stage cancer.  In reflecting upon cancer memoirs, it is always interesting to note whether the survivor is a writer professionally.  Cancer effects everyone regardless of occupation.  So it bounds to strike writers periodically.  And for someone who engages with the world via writing, writing about cancer is a natural outlet.  I have found that cancer memoirs written by writers are marked by a certain easy eloquence with language.  Expressions are quotable.  Emotions are captured with a certain lightness and precision.

Corrigan sets out to write her tale in the very specific context of being the only daughter of her bigger-then-life father.  In order to do that she chooses to constantly weave the present tale of her battle with cancer with past tales of growing up in the Corrigan household.  While this does much to elucidate how one’s bringing up influences our response to cancer, some readers, anxious to proceed with the cancer part of the narrative, will find these discursions an interruption to the flow of the story.

As we have seen in a number of other cancer books, setting the current battle with cancer in some family context is not uncommon.  In Corrigan’s case her ongoing relationship with her father overshadows her cancer story. In other narratives family history is just part of the setting.  George Corrigan is a natural salesman, a more fulfilled version of Willy Loman (Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman).  People gravitate to him.  He dominates the room.  He assigns nicknames not only to his family and friends, but to everyone he daily encounters – waitresses, clerks, and gas station attendants.

“He defined me, as parents do.  Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.  In my case he sees me as I would like to be seen.  In fact, I’m not even sure what’s true about me, since I have always chosen to believe his version.”

The discovery of her lump is casual, as it must be for many breast cancer survivors.  The initial confirmation by a physician and the follow-up guided needle biopsy are also familiar territory.  What doesn’t always get mentioned is the “perverse” wish for a cancer diagnosis, if only to affirm our hypochondria in seeking medical attention.  Equally familiar is the immediate impulse “to take back my perverse thoughts and promise whoever may have heard them that no matter what flashes of curiosity I may have had, I definitely, definitely, don’t want cancer.”

When she first tells her father of her diagnosis, he responds in an affirmative way, “I’m just saying you can do this, Lovet.  You’re special.  I’ve always said it.  You’re a very special girl, that’s all.”

At a recent cancer book club I attend, some members thought that Edward, Kelly’s husband was neglected in the telling of this tale.  The occasional attention he does receive in the narrative is positive.  In a shower scene after Kelly has gone through the public ritual of cutting her hair before it falls out, he tells her “I’m serious … you can do this … you have such a pretty face.” She reples,  “You’re such a good husband, and that is such an important thing to be.”

Next Reading Assignment” Chapters 15-28, to page 187.

Discussion Questions: Continue to focus on relationships.  What are your thoughts on how Kelly responds to her father’s cancer situation?

The Middle Place

cancer

Mondays are book days.  Most of the time we feature the Being Cancer Book Club.  I am experimenting with a three-week instead of a four-week format.  But my other task is expanding the Reviews section. Thus today’s offering.  I chose this book because I am adding a Books By Bloggers section to our Book List feature.

The Adventures of Cancer Bitch by Sandi Wisenberg

A person’s response to cancer reflects that person’s personality, their upbringing, and their culture as well as their biology.  These differences are what we find interesting about their stories although it may be the universality of the cancer experience that we hope to discover and, in doing so, find affirmation of our own.  Cancer blogger, Sandi Wisenberg, happens to be a professional writer.  Not all cancer writers are.  She demonstrates her talents easily with phrases like – “It’s the subtlety of it, as cruel as a mean girl’s gossip, almost not there but there.“

Her “Cancer Bitch” reads like someone who has thrown herself open to the experience, emotionally and intellectually buffeted by the currents, recording everything just as it washes over her.  She takes us through the drama of her diagnosis of breast cancer, her mastectomy and aftercare, fussing with drainage tubes and specialty apparel.

“The Adventures of Cancer Bitch” took an atypical route for cancer memoirs.  The tone is very straightforward, cynical at times, whimsical at others.  It is largely an unsentimental telling.  The author does not appeal so directly to our emotions.  Nor does the success of the book depend upon humor.  Indeed the prominent variations found in books about cancer experiences fall into either the “cancer profoundly changed my life for the better” camp or the “I had to laugh so I wouldn’t cry” school.

The author’s strong political convictions prompt her to question the purity of motive of big corporations acting as sponsors for cancer fundraising events, the well-publicized, media-blanketed events that allow everyone to feel good about the ’cause’.  Where do the dollars go?  research into more effective drugs with ever-higher profit margins? or prevention and early detection efforts? or solving the even more politically treacherous questions about what factors of modern life (shampoos, deodorants, food additives) contribute to cancer risk in the first place.  Still…they are raising money to combat the cancer lurking so threateningly in her body. Her political reaction is conflicted.

Later she deals with the issue of pain. “The topic for today is pain and pain – pain that causes weeping and pain that comes from weeping, and how difficult it is to tell the difference between the two.”  And the pain of depression, “soul corroding depression.  The kind of depression where the world seems like a vast desert and there nothing to connect to, to hold onto, that every human in the universe is just a little desperate bucket of misery just going after distraction.  And you carry on a conversation in the midst of this depression, but the conversation is going on in a parallel, pretend world, what’s real is the feeling underneath you can’t shake, that nothing matters.  And you can’t stand it.”

Her anxiety sets in motion a confluence of both suffering and depression.  “Underneath the suffering was psychic pain, which is an entity, but I can deal with an entity, it is better than the erosion created by depression, which is more absent than absence, depression is the oxygen-gulping aridness of the world…So there is no part of you left that can slither its way around and get its interest quickened by an idea or person or mind or glazed Moroccan tiles.  There is no room for beauty … There is only the ash that’s left after a fire, after a long, long rain.”

Everyone deals with cancer in their own way.  The way we respond to the experience of cancer is very much mediated by our character, personality, upbringing, and other important life experiences.  The author has found an original voice to tell her tale.  The author’s unique persona is exemplified by the section near the end of the book titled “An Accounting”.  Many cancer accounts include a “what I have learned” section and “Cancer Bitch” is no exception here.  But even here she avoids sentimentality, hilarity, and “tired inspirational quotes”.  There is real, honest, hard-earned advice here.

“Some people don’t know how to react to a cancer diagnosis and will disappear”  Many fellow travelers have confirmed this to me. “Don’t think about people who died (of cancer)”  Your friends will avoid this topic like the plague, and instead will only remind you of all the people who did well.  “That you can switch oncologists” is advice that some of us could have, should have taken but for our fear.

“That the person with whom you were friendly, who was there when you received the cancer phone call, will be decidedly unempathetic and in the course of a year, will never ask how you are doing.”  This may sound cynical, even anger, but honest it is.  Too often we do not talk about the anger we are feeling because of the cancer.

When I asked her about her “Cancer Bitch” tag, the author told me in an email “it has allowed me to be more arch and sarcastic in my writing, while at the same time being self-critical. This is especially so when I write about Cancer Bitch in the third person.”

“That you prefer medical care by women.” It is certainly easy to imagine that, especially for breast, gynecological, and even prostate cancers, the sex of the practitioner might be relevant in how comfortable we feel.

Though Wisenberg does not try to make humor a theme in her writing, she doesn’t lack a sense of irony.  “That in hospitals they still wake you up to see how you are doing.”  “That you sister will call you after every chemo” suggest both irony and understated gratitude.

The author ends the book with an account of participating in a cancer march.  She suggest that the sponsoring institution might well have a double agenda – not only to honor the survivors but also to advertise its role in combating cancer.  Is this cynical?  Maybe, but having been on the corporate aide of healthcare, I can attest that visibility at such public events is essential to the public relations concerns of healthcare systems.

In her closing paragraph Wisenberg, again in the third person, refers to herself as “a cynical Cancer Bitch.”  She resents the fact that no one at her treating hospital “had done anything to commemorate my last round of chemo.”  But then she imagines that at next year’s march, she might bring all her “chemo escorts” to march beside her.  “It might be meaningful.  It might be festive.”                                        Order from Amazon: The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

cancer

By now most readers will have taken the hint and googled “Robert Schimmel” to learn of last year’s scandal. But before we delve into that issue and how it should or shouldn’t effect our appreciation of the book, let us just examine the last few chapters.  The scene in which the author is experiencing the chills and rigors, the beginning of a neutrapenic fever, is reminiscent.  He is home alone and needs to get to the hospital.  He is living in Arizona where the outside temperature is 114.  And yet he needs a sweater and ski jacket to feel warm!  At the hospital all is a daze, voices disembodied.  He eventually feels so wretched that he at least voices a desire to kill himself by jumping out the window.  A visit by his children brings him back from that brink of despair.

Once again we have a book by a survivor whose family hisotry includes experience with the Holocaust.  This story involves a forced march.  Anyone who falls behind or strays is shot.  A German soldier advises Schimmel’s father “If you want to live, keep moving.” Advice that the son, Robert, can now take to heart in his battle with lymphoma  This memory and the appearance of his kids at a crucial moment energizes the author into redoubling his efforts to fight.

In making an assessment of this thiungs in life most important to him, Robert finds himself spelling out the name of the girlfriend he had left at the beginning of his cancer journey – Melissa.  He coerces his mother into taking him for a drive, breaking him of of the hospital.  When she balks at driving him to Los Angeles, they head for a phone booth.  During the call, we realize that six months before he had broken up with her, told her to “move on” without revealing his cancer situation.  She reveals to him that she is dating someone, that, in fact,  she has slept with this man for the first time just the day before.  After the conversation, he is determined to fly to L.A. to see her, returning the same night.

The scene that follows is pure Hollywood.  It is raining, he sees her silhouette in the upstairs window.  She is kissing her new boyfriend.  Schimmel leaves her a note under her windshield and returns to his apartment.  A dumb idea he thinks.  But soon he receives a phone call. The new boyfriend went out to get some food, finds the note, and returns with it upstairs.  A dumb idea it turns out.  They are reunited.  Schimmel is cured.  He and Melissa marry and have two children.

Schimmel leaves us some advice.  His message is straightforward, as is the style of his book.  This, I think, is the reason for its popularity and success. ~ Keep your sense of humnor, no matter what.  ~ Create a purpose, a focus, and never take your eyes off of it.  ~ Figure out what’s important to you.  ~ Be open.  Try anything.  You never know.  ~ Love.  You need love.  Tons of it.  A shitload of love.  ~ Sometimes you need to be selfish.  ~  You need support.  You’re in this alone, but you can’t fight alone.  ~  The most precious thing you have is time.  Don’t waste it.  ~ You are ony human.  ~ And,  finally, once again – laugh.

In early 2009 Robert Schimmel is arrested at his home for domestic battery.  He and Melissa later divorce.  Cancer sometimes make heroes of us.  It cannot make us saints.

Next Book: The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan.  First discussion in two weeks.  Questions will be posted next Monday.  Order from Amazon: The Middle Place

cancer

~Upgrades~

This has been a dreary weekend so I spent a lot of time at the computer.  Most of the time I spent working on the blogroll.  First I added a lot of links, mainly under brain cancer, breast cancer, and thyroid cancer.  We are now up to 800 cancer blogs.  The page was getting a bit unwieldy so I divided it roughly in half.  Cancer Blogs I is for brain cancer to kidney cancer blogs.  Cancer Blogs II contain blogs from leukemia to the widows/widowers sections.  I also finally separated out the Hodgkin’s disease blogs and the other (non-Hodgkins) lymphomas.  The two groups have very different demographics.

Now I need to go back through and update each of the 800 sites.  This is going to be a lot of work, one of those labors of love.  But I did feel that maybe now it was okay to install a PayPal Donate button to my site.  No pressure, no guilt.  It’s there is the spirit so moves you.

I also installed some social networking widgets for Google Friend Connect and Networked Blogs.  If you wish to join those, that would be cool too.  I thought it appropriate to add a Blogging With Integrity badge.  A Healthcare Code of Ethics badge should follow shortly.

~Book Club~

Chapter 5 begins with cogent if counter-intuitive advice from Schimmel’s physician “Embrace your cancer!” What he means, of course, is a medical version of the “bring it on” school of advice – understand the cancer, envelope it, grapple and conquer it.

What that means to Schimmel is to embrace other ideas and practices that we might once have thought of as weird, foreign, or too “out there”. This seems common for many victims of cancer.  As Schimmel says, “Try anything. Something you previously considered crazy, harmful or forbidden might just be exactly what you need now….There are no more long shots.  Everything is off the table.  Everything and anything is worth the bet.  Because I have nothing to lose.”

I pause here to inject my editorial opinion that this approach is best considered when added as a supplemental or complimentary adjunct to the medical treatment plan.  Looking for therapies in lieu of accepted medical practices is really gambling with your life.

Schimmel starts with eating a porterhouse steak (he is a vegetarian) moves on to Reiki therapy and then to acupuncture and Transcendental Meditation with a mantra “borrowed” from his mother.  Later he tries a visualization technique that succeeds in bringing  a sense of control to his fractured world.  “I begin to reorder my priorities. I see that all my relationships are shifting and deepening, and I accept that.” An episode of smoking pot leads to panic, to be alleviated by Xanax.  But at least he gains weight.

At the close of the chapter Schimmel shares his previous experience with cancer.  His son, Derek, died of it.  He now describes Derek as an “old soul” – someone with wisdom beyond their years, paid for by the experience of childhood cancer and it treatment.  We saw the same phenomenon at work in the recent movie My Sister’s Keeper. (see “Reviews” in the header above).

Chapter 5, Getting Laid, allows Schimmel in familiar comedic territory.  Some readers may be turned off by the author’s frankness about sex.  But behind this comic bravado lurks  feelings of sexual image as tied to a sense of well being familiar to those with cancer, especially those whose disease or treatment meant disfigurement.

Reading Assignment: Chapters 6 – 8 (finish the book)

Discussion Questions: At the end of any cancer memoir, readers come to admire the books subject.  In light of recent scandal (Google “Robert Schimmel arrest”), how did this news affect your opinion of the author?  Holocaust stories seem to haunt a number of cancer memoirs.  How did the Schimmel family history influence Schimmel’s response to cancer?  Explore your reactions to Robert’s reuniting will Melissa.

cancer

Robert Schimmel has perhaps been one of the more controversial authors of cancer memoirs.  In his professional life as a stand-up comic, he has always been known for a raw form of humor replete with obscenities and sexual references.  Difficulties in his personal life recently seem to mirror his on-stage persona.  But our primary obligation in discussing a book is to focus on the writing and the story.  Biography should be the background and not the context of the discussion.  Cancer happens to all kinds of people.  All people have foibles and dark closets.

Schimmel seemed to have everything going for him when he was diagnosed with stage III non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  He had just won Comic of the Year and had starred in an HBO special.  He was ready to sign for a sit-com on the Fox Network.  He is working hard.  Then come the familiar symptoms: fatigue, chills, night sweats.  Run down?  working too hard? … or lymphoma?

Schimmel is not unfamiliar with cancer.  He had a child, Derek,  that died of it.  Hard on his marriage.  He has married and divorced the same woman three times.  A nodal biopsy at Mayo and a second opinion confirms the diagnosis.  You think about dying…Even before you get the news.  The thought creeps into your head, takes a seat, and stays there, the elephant in your brain.

The comic relates meetings with his oncologist, the chaplain, and his nurses.  It is clear that he will use his sense of humor as a primary coping mechanism.  His medical team and other clinic patients enjoy this approach.  He’ll retain an audience even as he endures treatment.  His personal life is more complicated.  His about-to-be-divorced wife, Vicki, volunteers to care for him duriung his ordeal, welcoming him back home to be with her and their children.  Schimmel considers it unfair to lay the burden of his illness on his girlfriend, Melissa, nearly half his age.  For reasons that probably made sense at the time, he breaks up with her without even revealing his diagnosis.

Humor propels him down the road of cancer treatment.  He finds comic fodder in hair loss, nausea, extreme fatigue, even playing the “cancer card.”  I need to make people laugh.  That’s what fuekls me, feeds me, stirs my soul.  Making people laugh defines me.

As with his art, so goes his life. Sex is a big party of his comic routine because it is a big part of his life, or maybe he’s just more candid about this than the rest of us.  Doesn’t matter what’s going on with mu body.  I can be aching all over, weak, bleary-eyed, throwing up, and have diarrhea, but if a cute woman walks by, my mind goes ‘Boy, would I love to have sex with her.’

We leave this week’s discussion as Schimmel enters the “exploratory” phase of his illness journey in which he embraces all and any approach to fighting cancer.

Next Reading Assignment: Chapters 4 and 5, to page 134.

Discussion Questions: What about cancer drives one to consider alternative or complimentary approaches to adding to the battle arsenal?  Can you relate this to your own experience?  Schimmel suffers some bodily disfiguration.  How does that affect his and your own (if that’s the case) self-image?  Schimmel has a scare regarding testicular cancer.  How did you deal with ancillary threats during your illness?

cancer

the Present ... and Future

This is my first ‘freshly written” post of the New Year, the start of a New Decade.  What this year and this decade hold for each of us is, of course, unknowable.  That is what makes any new beginning interesting and, at the same time, scary.  How many of us will find ourselves cured?  How many of us will earn our  remission status, then watch it hold on stubbornly or else slip into dreaded relapse?  Who among us will bravely decide on a first or maybe second transplant?  For whom will this passing decade be marked as the years of dark foreboding, being eclipsed by the coming years of bright rebirth?  And how many new readers and writers will find their way to Being Cancer and the whole cancer blogging community, glad that they discovered it but deeply saddened that they had occasion to seek it?

These are worthy and timely speculations.  Useful sometimes.  Unavoidable sometimes.  But most of us have learned that our best point of focus is on the here and now.  We are still here in Boston.  The twins, Gemma and Molly, approaching their one month birthday,  are stirring slightly from their playpad on the living room floor.  Outside the snow is piling up quietly.  Inside the hum of the furnace is broken only by Molly’s hiccups.  It makes for a reflective time.  And it makes being in the present easy and enjoyable.

What might 2010 bring to this website?  Quite a bit if my plans and energy remain true.  I want to expand the “Cancer Blogs” list to perhaps 1000 entries.  I plan to make it easier to use with explanations of which blogs are active and which are not, to include the specific sub-diagnosis more often, and to improve the navigation features.  Likewise I want to build on the “Reviews” section, eventually featuring a Top Ten in cancer books and movies.  I want to improve the graphics and add useful widgits, moving the site to more of a Web 2.0 interactive design.  Sometime this year I will open a new website to feature my on-line journal, Diary of an Illness, in its entirety.  This will remain a free on-line publication, as it has been the past eight years on the Oncology Nursing Society website.  A number of schools utilize the Diary in courses about cancer and illness.  And, of course, we will rejoin our Book Club. I have listed the next five or six books in the “Book Club” section.  You can order new and used copies of the books directly through this site if you wish.

Our January Book Club Selection is Cancer on Five Dollars a Day (chemo not included): How Humor Got Me Through the Toughest Journey of My Life by Robert Schimmel, stand-up comedian and his battle with stage III non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

My very early New Year’s Resolution is to get more organized.  A good start on our Being Cancer Book Club bogged down this fall with bouts of H1Ni and other viral invasions, a trip to Ireland, and holiday preparations.  Today I am publishing a list of the next five books, taking us into the summer.  I think you will enjoy the selections, as they go from humorous to intensely probing, from inspirational to practical.  And they include one book from a fellow blogger, Kris Carr.  You can put them on your Christmas list.  If you order through the Amazon links on this site, I get 4% commission.

New on the site is an Honor Roll for Excellence in Cancer Writing.  Right now this consists of bloggers whose have been printed here as Guest Posts.  Honor Rolls blogs are designated on our Cancer Blogs page with  ** .  They are also listed on a new page entitled “Honor Roll”

Bookshop in Kinsale, Ireland

~ January 2010 selection: ” Cancer on $5 a Day ” by Robert Schimmel

Schimmel already had a hit HBO stand-up comedy special and a Stand-Up of the Year title from the American Comedy Awards when, in the spring of 2000, he was diagnosed with Stage III non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His world changed instantly; success in the raunchy joke trade-he also had an edgy FOX series in development-was replaced by the struggle for survival, the rigors of chemotherapy and all the fear and uncertainty that goes with it. Schimmel also looks back on his son, whom he lost not long before to brain cancer. Among a crowded field of inspiring and straight-talking personal survival stories, Schimmel’s conversational account is particularly ribald, emphasizing the importance a sense of humor can play in coping, learning and healing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Order from Amazon: Cancer on Five Dollars a Day (chemo not included): How Humor Got Me Through the Toughest Journey of My Life

~ February 2010 selection: “The Middle Place” by Kelly Corrigan

Newspaper columnist Corrigan was a happily married mother of two young daughters when she discovered a cancerous lump in her breast. She was still undergoing treatment when she learned that her beloved father, who’d already survived prostate cancer, now had bladder cancer. Corrigan’s story could have been unbearably depressing had she not made it clear from the start that she came from sturdy stock. Growing up, she loved hearing her father boom out his morning HELLO WORLD dialogue with the universe, so his kids would feel like the world wasn’t just a safe place but was even rooting for you. As Corrigan reports on her cancer treatment—the chemo, the surgery, the radiation—she weaves in the story of how it felt growing up in a big, suburban Philadelphia family with her larger-than-life father and her steady-loving mother and brothers. She tells how she met her husband, how she gave birth to her daughters. All these stories lead up to where she is now, in that middle place, being someone’s child, but also having children of her own. Those learning to accept their own adulthood might find strength—and humor—in Corrigan’s feisty memoir.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Order from Amazon: The Middle Place

~ March 2010 selection: ” Called Away ” by Mary Cappello

In her intensely personal and insightful memoir, Mary Cappello wonders aloud for us what breast cancer awareness really makes us aware of, and responds as if for the first time to the deceivingly simple command: “tell me what you’re feeling.” Unable to eat on chemotherapy, Cappello feasts on the paintings of Marsden Hartley, yearns in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, keeps company with Marcel Proust, and lets queer artists tease her back to life. Called Back looks through the lens of cancer to discover—often with humor—new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away.

Order from Amazon: Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

~ April 2010 selection:  “Crazy, Sexy, Cancer Tips” by Kris Carr

CRAZY SEXY CANCER TIPS gathers the lessons learned and advice offered from Carr’s own journey, as well as the experiences of her cancer posse. Full-color photos accompany personal stories and candid revelations in this scrapbook of advice, warnings, and resources for the cancer patient. Chapters cover your changing social life, dating, sex, and appearance; essential health tips on how to boost your immune system; recipes; medical and holistic resources; and information on young survivor support groups. The resulting book is a warm, yet informative tool for any woman newly diagnosed with the disease and for those who love them.

Order from Amazon: Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips

~ May 2010 selection:  “It’s Not About the Bike:  My Journey Back to Life” by Lance Armstrong

People around the world have found inspiration in the story of Lance Armstrong–a world-class athlete nearly struck down by cancer, only to recover and win the Tour de France, the multiday bicycle race famous for its grueling intensity. Armstrong is a thoroughgoing Texan jock, and the changes brought to his life by his illness are startling and powerful, but he’s just not interested in wearing a hero suit. While his vocabulary is a bit on the he-man side (highest compliment to his wife: “she’s a stud”), his actions will melt the most hard-bitten souls: a cancer foundation and benefit bike ride, his astonishing commitment to training that got him past countless hurdles, loyalty to the people and corporations that never gave up on him. There’s serious medical detail here, which may not be for the faint of heart; from chemo to surgical procedures to his wife’s in vitro fertilization, you won’t be spared a single x-ray, IV drip, or unfortunate side effect. Athletes and coaches everywhere will benefit from the same extraordinary detail provided about his training sessions–every aching tendon, every rainy afternoon, and every small triumph during his long recovery is here in living color. It’s Not About the Bike is the perfect title for this book about life, death, illness, family, setbacks, and triumphs, but not especially about the bike. –Jill Lightner

Order from Amazon: It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

We got home from Boston about 2 PM yesterday.  Unfortunately I didn’t find the time or energy to write the Monday book discussion post.  Hopefully I’ll get back on my regular writing schedule this week.  New projects keep popping up in my mind.  I got a new book on my blogging software, WordPress 2.7 Cookbook. So I plan to make some physical and content additions and changes to the site.

This week’s reading assignment was from our book Lisa’s Story by cartoonist Tom Batiuk.  The second half of the book, subtitled “The Other Shoe” deals predictably enough with Lisa’s relapse of her breast cancer.  I continued to find the comic-strip format easy to relate to.  Through the little daily graphic bits of storyline, Les and Lisa became famiiar friends.  Lisa’s relapse experience is unfortunately too familiar to many of us.  Les: “I don’t get it…You’ve been cancer-free for almost seven years.  Your cancer shouldn’t be coming back now.”  Lisa replies ironically “Apparently the cancer had other ideas.”

Because of this unique format, Batiuk, as he has done in the course of writing “Funky Winkerbean”, is able to portray sensitive subjects effectively and with minimal discomfort to the reader.  Sex and cancer are given a knowing nod.  One quiet evening, their daughter asleep for the night, Lisa seductively suggests a romantic liason, then adds the zinger “Once the chemo starts…this playground will be closed for repairs.”

Later Lisa has trouble finding her car in the parking garage due to chemo brain.  I can relate.  A great example of this genre’s capacity to concentrate a point into a few frames occurs in the two bottom frames on page 108.  Loading up their car, a friend asks Les “How are you doing?”  He answers “I’m okay…But cancer changes everything.  Everytime I hug Lisa…it’s like trying to hold onto our dreams.”

The fit Lisa changes before our eyes into the bald, then slowly emaciated and weak Lisa.  No narration is necessary to point this change out.  Medical error finds its way into Lisa’s story.  Early news that Lisa has achieved a second remission – and the joy of this news providing source material for a week’s worth of strips – tragically gives way to the discovery that scan results had been mistakenly switched with another patient.  She is actually not in remission.  But the good news is, if you can view as that, that she is eligible for an experiemental protocol.

But the clinical trial is difficult to endure and is showing no sign of improvement.  The issue of quality of life is eloquently handled.  Lisa says she wants to stop treatment.  “But you’ve always been a fighter,” Les protests.  “This is a new fight,” Lisa replies, “I want to live the time I have left…not just be alive.”  Realization becomes clear.  He asks “Are you sure you know what you want?”  “Yes…I know exactly what I want.  I want to see the leaves turn one m ore time.”  Who of us has not had thoughts such as this?

The unique strength of this visual format shows itself in the bottom two frames on page 204.  Lying in the dark in bed, Les tells Lisa that it’s okay for her to “go”.  The impact of the final frame in which they hug each other in the dark is nearly impossible to duplicate in words.

Even after she is enrolled in hospice, Lisa is still able to exhibit lightness and humor in the face of foreshortened future.  She jokes about her everchanging “new normal” and about the possibility of Les remarrying after her death “as long as you give it a reasonable amount of time…say twenty or thirty years.”

Batiuk is able to emply a recurring visual device.  The park bench under a particular tree in a nearby park, a favorite place for the couple to sit.  We see seasons change.  Sometimes Lisa looks well, other times she is bald and wearing a baseball cap.  Sometimes the bench is empty.  Les buries her ashes there in the pouring rain.  Later he takes his young daughter to the park and it becomes a favorite place for them to sit.  Ten years later Les are his daughter, now a young woman, sit on the bench awaiting the start of the “Lisa’s Legacy – Making Strides Against Cancer” walk.  They get up to begin the memorial walk.  We see a brass plaque on the bench “For Lisa”.

From the author, Tom Batiuk: I appreciate you selection of Lisa’s Story for your book club. I’ll watch what’s being said and will be more than happy to respond to any comments or questions. I can also be quite and listen.
Your choice is interesting because I just yesterday took part in the inaugural Lisa’s Legacy Run in Cleveland. In response to Lisa’s Story, University Hospitals in Cleveland and the Ireland Cancer Center established The Lisa’s Legacy Fund for Cancer Research. All the proceeds from the run go to the fund, so, Lisa, a comic strip character, indeed has a real life legacy.

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