As it is for my friends, the thought of dying is never far from my mind. It is a possibility, and my oncologist hasn’t said that I’m not, so I exist in a netherworld where I hold my breath and wonder when it will happen and how. He actually thinks I’m doing quite well. He said so, after I asked, because the dread of dying was weighing heavily on me that day.
Elaine Mansfield is honest in her book about her husband Vic’s struggle with lymphoma. She writes of her growing fatigue from being his constant caregiver over the years, and then, after his death, of learning to live with the emptiness of the home they shared.
What I look for in a memoir about cancer and grief is honesty. I don’t want sugar. Sugar doesn’t give me real hope. Sugar melts away when tears begin to fall. I want truth because I want to learn about the stress and despair that caregivers have to endure as they take care of someone with terminal cancer, and I want to know how she survived when the future she dreamed about was taken away.
Stark details, and all too familiar. They don’t say anything about who Brian was. How he wrote in a way that made grown men drool and old women swoon clutching their rosaries. How he touched the lives of thousands of people who knew him or read his words. He was reverent and irreverent, often in the same sentence. Insightful. Optimistic. Funny. Stuffed full of heart and faith. An artist with words that stunned with their lyrical beauty.
Helen Valier, A History of Prostate Cancer, 2016, Palgrave MacMillan.
This is the best book I’ve found that covers the scope of prostate cancer—history, treatments, and research. While quite a few articles exist elsewhere that deal with the topics in specific ways, Helen Valier has brought everything together, and her book answers most of my questions. I say most because her book came out in 2016, and medical advances have continued to occur over the last nine years. One example is the development of the PSMA-PET scan that can detect trace amounts of cancer cells that traditional scans like the MRI and CT miss.
Bear with me for a moment. I used to light candles, think of those who needed support, and prayed. I often still do, but talking to the trees seemed to be the right thing to do here.
Having cancer isn’t funny, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop telling jokes.
What makes Bowler’s book significant in the world of books about cancer is that she is dying and she’s not. She has Stage 4 colon cancer that is being held at bay by experimental chemotherapy and immunotherapy, and lives two months at a time, from one checkup to the next. If the checkup is good, then she knows she has two more months of life. If it’s not, then she knows to start saying goodbye.
Effective health care begins when patients feel their concerns are being heard and they are involved in deciding their course of treatments. Atul Gawande’s books speak of the need for patients to feel empathy from their doctors, and of the challenges that doctors face to provide the right care. He writes eloquently from the doctor’s perspective and tells stories in a narrative voice rather than using the language of clinical reports that cite case studies. Doctors and nurses find in him a kindred voice.
It’s still shocking to hear the doctor say you have cancer. My annual PSA test came back with a number that was much higher than the year before, so I knew something was afoot. The news surprised me because I had no physical symptoms of a problem. I expected to end up in the large “we’ll watch to see if anything changes” group that most men are in where nothing needs to be done.
Not all of us are poets, of course, and not all of us would take time away from living our last months to look for the words to express what we are feeling and thinking. Rather than write, we may want to complete items from our bucket list that we’ve kept putting off, or focus on sharing everything we’ve learned about life with our children. Maybe we want to stop trying to achieve goals and simply enjoy each day free of outside expectations.
