In-Between
Days: A Memoir about Living with Cancer is an accurate and suggestive title.
At 37, Teva
Harrison was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer with metastases to her
bones. She lives between hopes for new treatments allowing a useful life but
also fears about debility—some already caused by her treatments—and death. An
artist, she has created a hybrid of a graphic novel with comic-book style
drawing on the left page and traditional prose facing on the right, with variations
of this format now and then.
The imaginative world of the book
ranges widely in mood, topic, and subject matter, and there is a helpful
organization to group the material.
Her Preface tells us how drawing
helped her gain some power over “the bogeyman that is my cancer” (p. 1).
In her Prologue, she tells of “living
in the shadows,” or “liminal spaces,” but choosing to occupy these as best she
can (p. 3).
Part One lays out the medical facts
and dilemmas. The sections are Diagnosis, Treatment, and Side Effects. The author describes the turmoil of being sick with no clear cause, the emotional impact
of the serious diagnosis on her and her family, also nausea, loss of fertility,
dilemmas of pain management, and many side effects of treatment, including weight
loss as well as sudden and torturous menopause. Part Two explains her social status,
her marriage, her “mixed-bag inheritance” (including high-risk Ashkenazi genes),
and social aspects, including feeling invisible as a patient, accepting help
from friends, being in a support group, and what does a likely “early demise”
mean for her, an atheist?
Part Three explores the many
emotions in sections for hope (using clinical trials, for example), gratitudes
(“At least I’m wasting, not bloating”), wishes, fears, and “Managing Anxiety at
Home” (pictures of yoga, gardening, long walks, house cleaning), self-blame,
and—nonetheless—dreams. The final section “Incurable” names her current status:
“In treatment for the rest of my life,” but the facing picture shows her as a
large powerful bird flying among dramatic clouds with the words “I mean what do
I have to lose?” Her prose affirms: “Live
like a tornado, when I can.”
