If you know of other books written by people with cancer that you think are great, please drop me a note. I’ve noted below when I wrote about the following authors and the kind of cancer they had.
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What do cancer patients who have written about their experiences write about after their cancer is gone? Many write one book on cancer and they’re done.
I have two cancer books next to each other on my reading stack — by Paul Kalanithi and Nina Riggs. More on this later.
Paul Kalanithi died in 2015 at age 37. He was diagnosed twenty-two months earlier with EGFR lung cancer. First line chemo worked for a time and he went into remission, resumed his work as a skilled brain surgeon, until the cancer began growing again and no treatment existed a decade ago that could stop it. There are options today because of ongoing cancer research.
At a benefit for breast cancer in East Peoria, world-famous Sylvia McNair sang music from Broadway and opera. Between songs she spoke of being diagnosed with aggressive Stage 3 breast cancer in 2006 and how crucial her community of close friends had been to her recovery. Her diagnosis came out of the blue because she had no family history of the disease, ate a healthy diet, was active, and her mammogram was clear six months before the diagnosis.
I’ve read a couple of interviews that Barry gave after his diagnosis where he talked briefly about cancer, but the only writing I’ve found is three pages in his “Deterioration” essay that was published after his death in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.
It can be really hard to feel joy during the winter holidays when you have cancer or any serious medical problem. If we try, we can hold our fears back enough to feel smatterings of happiness and moments of mirth. The uncertainty about what the coming year will bring can make it feel like a blue Christmas, a blue Hannukah. We are so not bubbling over with festive joy.
The holidays are traditionally a time when we renew our faith in people and in matters unseen, and we try to pile up enough hope to get us through the coming year.
She realized there was a problem when that the itching on her legs wouldn’t go away. This got worse, then she was exhausted all day. It took a year of going to different doctors before she found a doctor who knew what was going on.
In her book, Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika describes how draining it was to deal with cancer and fear of dying every day for four years as she went through multiple rounds of chemo, radiation therapy, and a bone marrow transplant before she was declared to be cancer-free. Feeling good enough to travel, she went on a three-month road trip to meet some of the people who wrote to her with support or asked questions from their own situations of grief or confinement.
The language we use to describe cancer matters because it speaks of how we are choosing to deal with our cancer.
Some people describe their experiences with cancer as a journey. It’s definitely not a sprint because it goes on for far longer than we expected. Some describe it as a wilderness trek, like hiking the Appalachian Trail, because so much is unknown about what we will encounter along the way. There will be times when we’re exhausted and can’t take another step. There will be storms that batter us around, trails that end and force us to backtrack and find a new route, and large wild and hairy animals show up — a lot of metaphorical, Joseph Campbell stuff.
Today I want to talk about Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer. Babine’s mother was diagnosed with a rare and deadly form of soft tissue cancer (embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma), and Babine copes with her anxiety by cooking. The book is accessible to everyone who is caring for a loved one who has cancer because we still have to eat to keep us healthy enough to care for them.
