Summary:

This book is a collection of photographs of patients and their family members, caregivers, administrators, and others in an Oregon nursing home. Photographs are accompanied by commentaries by the subjects, who talk about their lives, their suffering, their work, their survival.

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In this remarkable book of essays, Rafael Campo explores his coming-of-age as a gay Cuban-American physician. He presents us with a series of stories illuminating his childhood and college experience, skillfully interweaving them with narratives from his life as a young physician, especially his interactions with patients dying of AIDS. We follow the author from Amherst College, through Harvard Medical School, to his medical residency in San Francisco. At each step Campo is a close observer of human character and motivation--his own and others. At each step he asks, "Who am I? Who am I becoming?"

He discovers his identity as a gay man, an Hispanic man, a poet, and, finally, as a healer--not four identities, but one. He discovers, too, the healing power of connecting with patients, the "poetry of healing," something far different from the orthodox image of the physician-as-detached-or-distanced from his patients. Though Campo rejects the concept that physicians are agents for social change ("naive," he calls it), he brings sensitivity and poetry to bear on his continued search for "some way to give."

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The second film in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy, "Born on the Fourth of July" is based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic (played in the film by Tom Cruise), a good kid whose patriotism takes him to Vietnam in the late 1960s and brings him back home paralyzed from the chest down and burdened with the guilt of having accidentally killed a fellow soldier in combat. Living at home with his parents, Ron struggles fiercely with these challenges against the exacerbating background of his culture’s anti-war and anti-vet sentiments.

Things get bad for him, he gets very angry and leaves home for Mexico to forget it all with booze, drugs, and prostitutes. That false paradise eventually fails him, however, and he returns to the States and makes some positive moves, including visiting the parents of the soldier he had killed. He winds up being a spokesman for vets, anti-war ones in particular, and at the end he is wheeling himself out onto the stage of the Democratic Convention of 1976 to huge applause, feeling, as he has just said to a reporter offstage, "I’m home."

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Eleanor Lightbody (Bridget Fonda) and her husband Will (Matthew Broderick) travel to the Battle Creek Sanitarium for the cure. On the train, they meet Charlie Ossining (John Cusak) who hopes to make his fortune in the booming breakfast food industry. The san is run on strict rules of vegetarianism and sexual abstinence by John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins), inventor of the corn flake. Regular enemas, exercises, outings and baths are prescribed, but Will repeatedly breaks the rules and is lured into liaisons with a chlorotic fellow patient and his nurse.

Eventually, he and Eleanor turn to other unconventional treatments, which are not sanctioned by Kellogg, including nudism and sexual stimulation. Meanwhile Charlie joins up with George Kellogg (Dana Carvey), the Doctor's adopted but estranged son, who taunts his father when he is not extorting money from him. George sets the san on fire, but is reconciled with Kellogg during the conflagration when he sobs "Daddy give us a cuddle." The Lightbodys go home to a moderate pursuit of health.

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In 1877, Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1902) (Colm Feore) becomes the superintendent of the asylum in London Ontario, where physical restraints are used. His lovely but tense wife (Wendel Meldrum) is grudgingly deferential to his professional needs. They are parents of a happy little girl. Bucke travels to a Philadelphia conference to read a paper on his liberal ideas about care of the mentally ill, but he senses the intolerance of the audience and storms out.

An odd "free thinker" in the audience--who turns out to be the great American poet Walt Whitman (Rip Torn)--admired the paper. Whitman invites the doctor to meet his mentally disturbed brother kept at home rather than in an asylum. Smitten with Whitman and his philosophy, Bucke brings him to Canada.

At first, his wife and the town are suspicious of the famous stranger, but they gradually change their minds. The asylum replaces its coercive methods of care with exercise, music, and talk. The film closes with a lively summer cricket match between the asylum (patients and workers) and the town.

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Breast cancer is a constant presence in this collection of poems by Hilda Raz. Part 1 begins with the poet's uncertainty and fear as she sits with her daughter in the oncologist's office. "I'm still me, same me no / matter what he says. Biopsy report shocks me," she writes in "Weathering/boundaries/what is good." After going under the knife, she further reports, "In the past year / I have given up four of the five organs / the body holds to call itself woman." ("For Barbara, Who Brings a Green Stone in the Shape of a Triangle").

Later, in "Breast/fever" she speaks of her new breast, "two months old, gel used in bicycle saddles . . .

/ stays cold under my skin / when the old breast is warm." Several of the poems evoke her daughter Sarah, both as a child and as a capable young woman who responds to her mother's cancer--"she knows whom to call, / where to go, or she'll find out, I'm not to worry . . . . " ("Sarah's Response")

The poet's illness is a route to self-discovery. Hilda Raz reconstitutes herself with insight, pragmatism, and humor. As she writes in "Nuts," "Nuts to beauty. / Bikini, music, then the childbed . . .

/ Nuts to the mirror." At the end of the book, "The fingers of rain are tapping again. / I send out my heart's drum." ("Recovery")

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In a dark, stone enclosure numerous figures of indeterminate age and gender huddle in shadow while others crawl or writhe toward the murky foreground light. The visual center of the painting is the fierce struggle of two naked men whose grappling is made more agitated by the flailing whip of a dark, fully-clothed figure. Opening above the pen-like enclosure and the tormented figures is broad, white space, glowing with intense light--a shocking contrast to the darkness of this 18th century "snake pit." (See film annotation of The Snake Pit.)

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At the age of 21, shortly after moving to Ithaca, New York, to begin a new life with her fiance, the author experienced a stroke that left her aphasic and partially paralyzed. She returned home to Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she underwent months of physical therapy and rehabilitation.

This memoir takes us through the process of self-discovery by which Barbara Newborn learned first to understand and cope with her disabilities and then to overcome them. It recounts her depression and determination, her disappointment and exhilaration. Return to Ithaca ends about nine months after the stroke when the author had indeed returned to Ithaca to begin (once again) a new life.

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In 1984 Handler was a moderately successful 23 year old New York City actor, when he developed acute myelogenous leukemia. Strongly supported by his girlfriend and family, Handler underwent induction and, later, consolidation chemotherapy at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, where he also began his long experience (the "comedy of terrors" or, perhaps more appropriately, the "tragedy of errors") of a harsh, hostile medical environment populated by arrogant physicians, condescending nurses, and a host of unhelpful minor characters.

Handler carries us briskly through his first remission, the impact of his illness on his family and personal relationships, his experience with nonconventional healing (Simonton Cancer Center), his return to work on Broadway, his relapse, and the agony of a second round of induction chemotherapy at Sloan-Kettering.

Subsequently, he goes to Johns Hopkins Hospital to undergo the rigors of an autologous bone marrow transplant. At Hopkins he discovers to his surprise a medical setting far different from Sloan-Kettering: communicative, compassionate physicians and a patient-centered healing environment. Even the two hospitals' sperm banks reflect this radical difference in approach.

After surviving his transplant and a subsequent round of serious infections, Handler resumes his life. He realizes that most of the time nowadays he is not in touch with the sense of joy and gratitude for each moment that the illness taught him. Yet, these feelings exist below his consciousness; sometimes he steps through "a little doorway near the floor of my consciousness" and experiences his life in a simpler, more profound way.

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When we first meet Gary Madden he's face down on a hospital bed rigged to be turned every two hours to prevent bedsores. His head is in a brace and he can move neither arms nor legs. He was carried off the football field the previous week with a spinal cord injury and doesn't yet know what his prospects are for recovery. Eventually he learns that he has some hope of recovering at least partial use of arms and upper body, but virtually no hope of walking again.

His parents, a faithful teacher, a bewildered girlfriend, and a few awkward but good-hearted teammates find their various ways to see him through months of adjustment, some of them more helpful than others. They all have something to learn in the course of caregiving: his mother has to struggle not to be overprotective; his girlfriend has to find new ways to interpret his moods and her own as they try to imagine what future their relationship could possibly have; his closest friends know little about the nuances of sickroom diplomacy, which makes sometimes for comedy, sometimes for unintended pain.

His English teacher who has recently lost her husband in a car accident, turns out to be a significant mentor in transition as she forces herself to reach beyond her own loss to help him in his. One form her help takes is to open his imagination to other ways of living, through literature and poetry, and to a metaphor for how to live that might work better than "winning."

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