Breast Cancer and the Health Care System

 

Anne Boyer’s book about surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying, takes the reader inside what it feels like to endure chemotherapy without any promise of surviving. Boyer covers a wide range of topics—the physical suffering, fears about dying, coping with the pain, research into the medical treatments, the philosophy and history of breast cancer procedures, and the social inequalities of a for-profit health care system and the politics of care.

Stage 4 triple-negative breast cancer is not curable, but it is treatable, and cancer research is finding new ways to further survival. It has a high risk of recurrence. Chemotherapy offered Boyer a chance to life, although it would extract a toll on her body. Boyer survived, but the chemo damaged the nerves that control her heart.

Among her many insights, she points out that while breast cancer treatments are often covered by insurance and your place of work, the time that is needed to recover from the long-term effects of surgery and therapy often are not, and women lose their jobs, their homes, and too often they lose touch with who they are. She also points out that while many organizations receive funding for cancer, too few dollars are allocated to research to prevent cancer from starting. 

There are also paragraphs of circular thoughts when Boyer is trying to think her way through something, and this illustrates how chemo brains can get stuck in eddies of thoughts that circle around and around, trying to find a way out.

Boyer experiences the sorrow of losing friends who simply didn’t want to deal with cancer, and her joy of discovering other friends who stepped up to support and keep her going. Most of the chapters are short, as if they were taken from a journal that Boyer kept over the months of her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Here are some of her words: 

“Sometimes to give a person a word to call their suffering is the only treatment for it.”

“After a cancer diagnosis, very little is ever itself again.”

“We are supposed to keep our unhappiness to ourselves but donate our courage to everyone.”

“Being sick makes excessive space for thinking, and excessive thinking makes room for thoughts of death.”

“Some of us who survive the worst survive it into bare inexistence.”

“Pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it.”

“when I was at my lowest, what I needed most was art—not comfort”

“Recovery is tough and often lonely.”