Summary:

This is the story of Betty, a 250-pound, 5-foot-2-inch woman who comes to the psychiatrist-narrator's office to be treated for her eating disorder. What makes the story more than the sad tale of a depressed, obese woman is the immediate disclosure of the narrator that he is "repelled" and "disgusted" by fat women, that his "contempt surpasses all cultural norms."

Nevertheless, he decides to treat Betty, who successfully manages to shed huge amounts of weight and come to terms with many of the problems leading to her obesity. The narrator, too, confronts his own excessive biases so that readers are left with a sense that Betty "helped" him too.

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Also called "Dr Péan Teaching His Discovery of the Compression of Blood Vessels at St Louis Hospital," the scene takes place in a room in which the walls are interrupted by tall windows.  Daylight shines through the windows, illuminating an attractive naked young woman in the right foreground who lies seemingly anesthetized -- her eyes are closed although there is no sign of anesthesia -- on a bed of some kind that is draped loosely with sheets.  Her body is pointing away from the viewer, her head facing away from us, her long hair falling casually over the near edge of the bed.  Her breasts are fully visible, especially her right breast, while her lower body is covered.  A seated man grasps the wrist of her bent right arm, perhaps taking her pulse. His hand and arm rest directly on the woman's body -- on her abdomen and groin area.  He appears to be reading from a paper.

In the left foreground is the edge of a table that holds some surgical instruments and a glass jar containing what may be anatomic specimens.  An imposing sideburned man stands to the left, above the head of the bed and the woman.  Holding a surgical instrument in his right hand, he gesticulates with his left-hand, his mouth partly open: he is lecturing to the people in the room, some of whom are looking directly at him while others talk to each other.  Two in the audience are women -- a nun barely visible in the far background, and a nurse standing behind two men who are near the bed.  The men are all dressed in street clothes.

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In this disturbing work Kahlo paints herself lying on her back in a hospital bed after a miscarriage. The figure in the painting is unclothed, the sheets beneath her are bloody, and a large tear falls from her left eye. The bed frame bears the inscription "Henry Ford Hospital Detroit," but the bed and its sad inhabitant float in an abstract space circled by six images relating to the miscarriage, all tied to blood-red filaments the figure holds in her left hand. The main image is a perfectly-formed male fetus. The others refer to aspects of childbearing.

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This is a collection of Elizabeth Layton's work, organized chronologically from 1977-1991. Contents include a biography and epilogue by a 27-year-old reporter (Don Lampert) who discovered, promoted, and became a dear friend of "a depressed grandmother with a handful of drawings under the bed."

Layton discovered contour drawing when she was age 68 and claims to have drawn herself out of mental illness. Her subject matter is self-portraiture, marriage, aging, depression, grandmothering, dieting, and political commentary (nuclear holocaust, capital punishment, mythology and hospital death).

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This is a collection of approximately 45 pathographies-essays, memoirs, biography, autobiography, poems, and reflections on illness experiences -grouped loosely into four categories of related subject matter. These categories are: Illness and Identity: Dynamics of Self and Family; Concealing Illness, Performing Health; Agency and Advocacy; Medicine at the Margins. The majority of the pieces are written by non-health care academics about their experiences with a wide variety of illnesses. A few have been written by or with health care professionals.

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The poem begins, "Somebody who should have been born / is gone" and this phrase is a refrain intercalated between two sets of three tercets, with a final closing tercet. Each tercet has a rhyme scheme of a, b, a. The speaker narrates a journey that takes her south to an abortionist in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and then, after the abortion, back home to the north. The situation and the speaker's perception of it are rendered in metaphors that draw on the natural environment through which the journey proceeds. At the beginning, the earth puffs buds, and the drive proceeds toward blue-green mountains -- metaphors of fecundity. The description of the mountains as "humps" might imply the sex act that initiated pregnancy.

Soon, however, there is foreboding as dark images of tearing and splitting appear: "the ground cracks evilly," "and me wondering how anything fragile survives." Then "a little man . . . took the fullness that love began" and the speaker returns north, physically and emotionally reduced as the sky grows thin and the road is "flat as a sheet of tin."

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Poet Leatha Kendrick is the author of two chapbooks, Science in Your Own Back Yard (see annotation) and Heart Cake. In this full-length collection she continues to examine themes explored in her first titles: love and loss; the fleeting of time; and her personal experience of breast cancer. Second Opinion is divided into three sections: the first two sections have 14 poems each, the final section has 13, perhaps to indicate that for this passionate and articulate poet the the final poem is yet to be written. The first poem in the collection, "A lesson in Love Unleashed," sets the theme for the poems that follow: "yes, I think, even in their distorted flesh, / I still desire what's gone. What I'm leaving" (p. 3). In the first and third sections, the poet writes of marital and familial trials and triumphs, both past and present, and in the second section--for me the most vivid in the collection--she writes about breast cancer and how this experience weaves in and out of her other loves and losses. This weaving is given both visual and emotional expression in the poem "Tonight Weaving" (p. 28)

Throughout the book, Kendrick's poems take varying forms and tones, and yet there is always the assurance of a constant voice--personal, passionate and often humorous. In the second section, the poems become more visually complex and fractured, poetic representation of the "distortion" of the flesh as the narrator considers the diagnosis and treatment of her breast cancer. In this section's opening poem, "The Calculus of a Cracked Cup," the poet writes, "Our position is never certain, only our / velocity" (p. 27), adding the concern of the swift passing of time to the collection's overall theme. In "Second Opinion," the title poem, she notes, "I want to believe in sudden remission, / in some way to avert what we are certainly / headed for" (p. 34). But while time rushes on, the reality of cancer, the loss of a breast becomes a "stopped surface" under which a "lost life" wants "its old course, not subject to IVs or a knife" (p. 35).

It is life--difficult and sweet--that is ultimately celebrated in these poems and that overcomes the losses. The most wry poems are found in the breast cancer section: "Christmas, Adolescence, Yin and Yang" (p. 32) is a sort of ode to "Skeeter and Bite," so named by a first love; now "they'll lift / one out, the eye sewn shut by mastectomy." "Costume. Fakery. The Sell." is a tough, nervy poem that has the narrator claiming acceptance for who she is, post surgery: "Alive! Tender, I'm not hiding" (p. 39). Throughout the book there is a subtle triple play on the word "tender": woman as caregiver; woman as collateral in a society that values cleavage; and woman as injured, post op, and physically vulnerable.

In the collection's final poem, "What You Leave Me," the theme of love and loss balanced against time comes to some resolution as the narrator and her partner join in a "sweet tangle": "the blossoming / hide, this bounded / time against brevity" (p. 64).

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Cancer Vixen is the graphic narrative of Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s eleven-month cancer experience in 2004. Marchetto, a successful forty-something cartoonist for Glamour magazine and the New Yorker, serialized Cancer Vixen in Glamour while undergoing treatment. As well as the narrative of Marchetto’s diagnosis, treatment, and remission, Cancer Vixen recounts the story of Marchetto’s romance and engagement to restaurateur Silvano Marchetto, a narrative embedded in the graphic novel despite preceding it in actual chronology. The narrative explores fears about the cancer's effect on the relationship and about the loss of the chance to be a biological mother, as well as developing the relationship between the engaged couple and between Marisa and her mother (or "(s)mother," as she calls her).

The culture of cancer is another focus, including the social dynamics of having hair during cancer treatment and thus leaving oneself open to critique for not undertaking a strong enough chemotherapy. While this New York story, full of cuisine, couture (including images of the specific shoes Marchetto wore to each chemo), and cappuccino may recall the episodes of the television show Sex in the City featuring cancer, the brightly colored frames of this “Cancer in the City” tale also engage political issues like environmental causes of cancer and the reduced survival rates of women with cancer and no insurance.

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A woman is pregnant. She is a nurse married to a physician, Jeff, and they have a young son, Willie. The couple is pregnant with their second child. Long before her due date, the woman--author Susan LaScala--begins experiencing signs of premature labor. Because she is a nurse, because she is married to a doctor who takes call, she doesn't want to over-react or bother her obstetrician unnecessarily. But when vague aches turn into cramps, the author enters, as a patient, the world she had known, until then, only as a caregiver.

It is impossible, in a brief annotation, to describe fully the richness of this memoir. Because the author is a nurse, she brings to the story of the premature birth and survival of her daughter, Sarah, a wonderful double vision: LaScala tells this tale not only as a mother and a patient but also as a clinician able to explain, in simple language, the complex technologies used to sustain the life of her one pound nine ounce baby. The author's rendering of the bells and whistles of neonatal medicine, whether describing the process of intubating a preemie (p. 23) or ultrasounding a baby determined to survive (p. 182-3) are precise and haunting.

Equally compelling (and instructive for caregivers) are the author's candid revelations of how it feels to be a patient. She takes to "grading" the doctors and nurses--an "A" for the staff that lets her see her newborn girl (p. 3), and a "C" for a nurse with "No kind words. No warmth" (p.11). She describes her own bodily sensations in language both lovely and informing: the pushing and tugging she feels during her C-Section is a "quiet violence" (p.21); standing beside her daughter during the ventilator weaning process she feels "a witch's brew of fear and panic mixing and growing inside" (p. 225).

In an introduction, physician Barbara Wolk Stechenberg, describes the "gift" that the author has given by writing this memoir. The author has allowed Dr. Stechenberg, who was part of the team that saved Sarah, "a rare glimpse into two worlds" (p. xii). One was the world of intensive care nurses and how "they truly are the primary caregivers" (p. xii). The other world was that of physicians, who "may feel we are empathic and caring, but we really have no idea of the emotional roller coaster many of our parents are riding" (p. xii).

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Dora Rare, the only girl child born in multiple generations of her family is encouraged by her mother to establish a bond with Miss Babineau, an odd isolated midwife, whose wisdom on health matters is much sought after by the local women in their small Nova Scotia community. Gripping and intimate encounters with her neighbours as birthing mothers and as women seeking control over their fertility lead Dora to accept a role as Marie’s successor. When arrogant, young Dr Gilbert Thomas comes to town with his strong ideas about science and birth, he is appalled at the practices of the local women; he also resents the competition. Dora embarks on a difficult marriage herself and seeks temporary refuge in the United States where she witnesses a new kind of independence.

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