Showing 361 - 370 of 464 annotations tagged with the keyword "Cancer"

Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

A physician seeks solace at the South Pole. Her planned one year stay there is cut short when she discovers a lump in her breast. The attempts to care for her at the South Pole (with telecommunicated help from the U.S.) prove insufficient and a plan to rescue her is successful.

There's more than the drama of illness in a remote location in this book, however. Intertwined with this story of illness is the story of the author's troubled marriage (to her physician-husband), the eventual estrangement from her children, the support of her family of origin, and most fascinatingly the daily rhythms of living (and doctoring) at the South Pole. Scattered throughout the memoir are occasional critiques of "corporate" medicine and poems that inspired the author throughout her ordeal.

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Annotated by:
Belling, Catherine

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

At the age of 42, Barbara Rosenblum learns, after several misdiagnoses, that she has advanced breast cancer. This book, co-written by Rosenblum, a sociologist, and her lesbian partner, Sandra Butler, a feminist writer and activist, is a record of their lives together from the diagnosis until Rosenblum's death three years later. Early on, Rosenblum decides that her dying will be exemplary and self-conscious, and she and Butler use their writing as a way to create an illuminating examination of their lives over those three years.

The book's title is accurate; the writing takes the form of alternating meditations by two women, on the effects of cancer on their relationship, their work, their families, and their social, political, and spiritual beliefs. Especially significant are the differences between their voices, and the differences between the experience of the person who is dying and that of the person who is going to have to survive and grieve. The writers bravely explore the conflicts between them as well as their profound bonds.

After a mastectomy and eighteen months of chemotherapy, Rosenblum has a very brief respite, followed by liver and lung metastases, and prolonged further chemotherapy. A few months after ending treatment, she dies at home.

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Two Dreams of Leukemia

Stone, John

Last Updated: Aug-23-2001
Annotated by:
Woodcock, John

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The doctor-speaker wonders about a recently diagnosed male leukemia patient: what will Mr. Claridge, who used to think of himself as a ladies' man, dream of now, after the diagnosis? In the final image the doctor-speaker imagines the sleep of his secretary, to whom Mr. Claridge had given a bottle of Nuit d'Amour perfume," her arms crossed like a nun's" and surrounded by the flowery scent of the perfume.

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Code Blue

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Aug-20-2001
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

In his first chapbook of poems, Richard Berlin, a psychiatrist, writes about his current work with patients ("What a Psychiatrist Remembers," "Rough Air," "Berlin Wall," "Jumpology"), about his experiences on medical wards and as a student ("Anatomy Lab," "Sleight of Hand," "Alzheimer's Unit," "Obstetrics Ward, County Hospital"), about love and family and how medicine sometimes infiltrates even these sanctuaries ("How JFK Killed My Father," "Tools," "Our Medical Marriage") and, most effectively, about the complexities inherent in the role of physician and healer ("What to Call Me," "After Watching Chicago Hope," "Code Blue," "What I Love"). In other poems, he observes the human condition through the veil of medicine ("Hospital Food," "PTSD").

The lure of these poems is Berlin's facility with metaphor; he has a talent for spinning a particular image or observation into revelation. He is also willing to allow puzzlement, doubt, and fear into his poems, effectively conveying both the virtuosity of the teacher and the wonder of the student. Reading this collection, I felt as if the poet was a presence both within the poems and outside of them, like the psychiatrist who must enter the mind of the patient and, at the same time, step back and become a safe guide. It is this double vision that sets his poetry apart.

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Out of the Bag

Heaney, Seamus

Last Updated: Aug-14-2001
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

The poet conjures up the image of the doctor who delivered him and his siblings ("All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag"), the doctor who arrived at the house in his fur-lined coat and ascended to his mother's bedroom, and later came down and arranged the instruments in his bag (a "plump ark"), which by that point was otherwise empty. In the boy's fantasy, Doctor Kerlin's small eyes were "peepholes into a locked room," in which were strung "the little pendant infant parts / . . . neatly from a line up near the ceiling-- / a toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock."

On a visit to the ruined temple of Asclepius, the god of healing, the poet finds himself remembering Doctor Kerlin, and also the incident when, as an altar boy, he fainted during a procession at the healing shrine of Lourdes in 1956. Now many years later, he pulls up some tufts of grass from around the temple and sends them to friends suffering from cancer. He remembers entering the bedroom after Doctor Kerlin left, his mother on the bed asking, "And what do you think / Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all / When I was asleep?" [94 lines]

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Annotated by:
Kennedy, Meegan

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Collection (Short Stories)

Summary:

Warren here supposedly presents the papers of a late friend, detailing the interesting cases he had encountered as a physician. In fact, the "cases" are sensational short stories, presented as a novel due to the framing chapter introducing the narrator's "Early Struggles" to make a living as a physician. Other stories investigate typically Gothic themes like ghosts, duels, graverobbing, elopements, and broken hearts, with other scandalous problems like gambling, dissipation, murder, domestic abuse, and suicide. Medical topics include mental illness, epilepsy, hysterical paralysis ("catalepsy"), cancer, toothache, consumption, syphilis, heart disease, alcoholism, disease of the spine, gout, amaurosis (blindness), puerperal hemorrhage, measles, and stroke ("apoplexy").

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Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Patsy (Genevieve Lemon), a middle-aged wife and mother of three grown daughters and a son (Russell Dykstra), is dying of cancer. Her children return home to spend time with and care for their mother in her final days. Each family member and Patsy's sometimes charming, sometimes abusive husband, Vic (Linal Haft), must face conflicts past and present as well as reconcile themselves to their mother's dying.

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August

Young, C. Dale

Last Updated: May-31-2001
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

August is divided into two sections: "On the Corner of Fourth & Irving" and "To Marie Curie." The narrator, on a street corner in San Francisco near the teaching hospitals and medical school of University of California, San Francisco, meditates on the recurrence of lymphoma in a patient. Evening is approaching, fog blows in from the ocean, and the city pigeons are unsettled--landing and taking flight.

The meditation includes a tribute to Madame Curie and her discovery of the effects of radium. The patient had had a good chance of cure by radiation treatment--unfortunately, this patient is in the twenty percent who are not cured. The narrator, probably a physician-in-training due to the load of textbooks, had read the patient's chest x-ray as negative (normal) previously.

By the end of the poem, we learn that the physician had felt enlarged lymph nodes in this patient's neck today and he bluntly states: "I have failed. He has not been cured." The poem closes with the sound of the wind and the "beating and beating of wings."

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What Counts

Liveson, Jay

Last Updated: May-22-2001
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

In the first section of the book ("Rejected Prayers"), Liveson proves that the prayers were not rejected; rather, they resulted in a group of thoughtful and moving poems. These poems speak eloquently of suffering patients, especially the elderly and neurologically compromised; for example, "Jenna," wearing her "diapered dress" (p. 16), "Sonnet to Sarah," who "lets her fingers trace the pattern on the wall," (p. 20), and the patient in "Praxis," whose "smile was rare but even" (p. 21).

These poems also speak passionately of social and historical pain, and of injustice writ large. Some of the most powerful are in the section called "Before the Plaster Sets," with which the book ends: "My First Death" (p. 63), "Holocaust Torah" (p. 66), and "Yom Kippur, 5760--Musaf" (p. 68).

The latter poem is a kind of contemporary re-envisioning of Allen Ginsburg’s 1956 poem "America." Jay Liveson writes, "Yom Kippur, this is serious. We sit here / hoping to somehow tune the engine / or at least check the map." Is tuning the engine enough? Perhaps we are fooling ourselves; much more needs to be done. How can we be content to sit and tune the engine in this unjust world? Perhaps the poem that speaks this theme most eloquently is "Statistical Causes of Traumatic Shock Syndrome in Gaza--Chart VII" (p. 72).

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Dire Cure

Matthews, William

Last Updated: Mar-27-2001
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

This long (11 stanzas of ten lines each) poem takes us through the--at first faulty--cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery endured by the speaker's wife, and witnessed by the speaker. The poet personifies the tumor because to do otherwise would mean that he would "have to think of it as what, / in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife." The poison of chemotherapy that renders his wife "averse to it all" is contrasted with "perky visitors" and the flowers that they bring.

The poet imagines that the tumor of which his wife has been cured now resides in "Tumor Hell" where it lies "bleak and nubbled like a poorly / ironed truffle." The doctors who practice in teaching hospitals show the students how to deal with tumors: "batter it . . . strafe it . . . sprinkle it with rock salt and move on."

Now that his wife is better, the poet and his friends consider how he has fared. At first he was unable to concentrate, made lists, "wept, paced, / berated myself, drove to the hospital" and was "rancid with anger." Yes, it was awful, but he rejects pity--even self-pity. Only his wife has the right to give a name to the experience: "let her think of its name and never / say it, as if it were the name of God."

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