Sophie's 5!

I have received a number of books recently that I hope to review in the coming months.  Since we have added so many new blogs since last year and have new readers, I am considering another shot at our Cancer Book Club.  I know people were participating but it was hard to determine how many and how consistently readers checked in.  Comments were consistent but few in number.  We did have good participation from most of the authors, even the actor Evan Handler.

I may try to think of different formats.  Last year we did a book a month, dividing it into four sections with a discussion each Monday.  I may try just one monthly discussion.  I might also investigate a forum mechanism.  Another idea would be a follow-up interview with the writer based on my questions as well as questions from Being Cancer Network readers.  I will be re-posting the Book Club page under the “Community” heading.  Take a look and let me know what everyone thinks.

In the meantime, these are some of the titles that have arrived in my mailbox:

~ Home Before Dark: a family portrait of cancer and healing by David, Kate, Michael and Sam Treadway.  This is a story of a psychologist and his physician wife, and how they and their adult children deal with his diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

~ From Incurable to Incredible: cancer survivors who beat the odds by blogger Tami Boehmer.  Tami is a two-time breast cancer survivor.  The book tracks the stories of twenty-seven survivors with different types of cancers.

~ Breastless in the City: a young woman’s story of love, loss, and breast cancer by Cathy Bueti, another cancer blogger.  The subtitle pretty well sums it up.

~ Stand By Her: a breast cancer guide for men by John Anderson.

~ Cancer Healing Odyssey: the remarkable story of Sun Hee’s ongoing recovery from stage IV ovarian cancer by Sarto Schickel.  A Korean woman, her American husband and their story of conventional plus alternative healing approaches to a dire diagnosis.

~ Killing Cancer: the remarkable anticancer effects of antidepressants by Julian Lieb, MD

My life searches for normalcy, a theme familiar to readers.  The publishing schedule that I so optimistically established months ago is more difficult to follow than I thought.  Fevers, fatigue, and family make for compelling detours.

But finally we return to Called Back, Mary Cappello’s meandering meditation on her breast cancer experience.  Readers looking for a start-to-finish, diagnosis-to-remission story will be disappointed.  The book is cut from a different mental fabric.  This is not a narrative about her cancer experience but rather a personal exploration of hidden meanings and symbols suggested by the nature of the disease and the idiosyncrasies of her treatment.

While the final two chapters are devoted to chemotherapy and then radiation treatment, the two therapies serve only as a launching point for the author’s astute though tangential reflections on a variety of unseeming subjects such as the meaning of color in life and in illness or the perfection of flowers.

Cappello writes in a kind of prose/poetry, words dense but at the same time lyrical, words that are precise though sometimes obscure.  She clearly loves language not only as a descriptor but as an exploratory tool, a manifestation of her commitment to semiotics.  But this kind of writing demands more from the reader.  And I suspect that readers  deep into their own cancer treatments will find the task all the more daunting.

The narrative thus does not “flow” like more ordinary memoirs but rather pitches forward haltingly, stopping frequently to examine words and nuance, then often taking detours further into her consciousness.  She objects to the word “fine” in relation to a cancer patient, finding the term “insultingly inacccurate if not dismissive.  A person following treatment for breast cancer will never be doing fine, though she will be doing differently.” The word “radiation” serves as a stepping off point for comparison to the concept of “radiance”.

The author’s points of reference belie her academic and intellectual background.  Spectres of books, fiction, poetry, and otherwise make appearances in her meditations.  Likewise works of art and of music serve of as vehicles for comparing cancer-related experience.

There is little dialogue in the telling.  And when it occurs, the dialogue is minimal and muffled, appearing only to propel the author’s thoughts toward other, deeper considerations.  Likewise the role of other persons in her narrative again serve as inspirations for analysis.  I was struck by the fact that Jean, her longtime companion, is mentioned only periodically though always with affection but never in much depth.  It may be that that relationship and its deeper implications has already by examined and deconstructed prior to the onset of her illness, there now being little need to interrupt the present narrative.

At the same time people in the book almost float by, unnoticed, being offered only to illustrate the current introspection.  I was surprised that the person I felt to be most present was her deceased step-father, Sid.  He appears in just a few paragraphs and yet it is the image of this relationship that was most vivid to me.

Near the end of the book, after spending weeks in the radiation therapy, Cappello discourses on the myriad conversations she has had with “fellow initiates”.   “Often in the radiation’s waiting room I experience narratives like this:  people tell me stories with a trundling force, a blast of urgency, breathless accounts of trial without end out of which springs an unanticipated revelation, a conferral, or an annointing, whether I’ve asked for it or not.”

“I write to give form to all that lingers,” begins the epilogue.  This is the author’s contribution to our collective cancer experience.  The book is sprinkled with wise and sometimes ironic insight.  This is not a book to be read to pass the hours while receiving chemo.  It is better to read it in repose, in a quiet, warm corner with a cup of tea, while the demons are sleeping.

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

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

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

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.