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

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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

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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

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~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.

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