Hi Jane I wondered if you saw the review in today's Observer..pasted here..for Meredith Norton's book, Lopsided, How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting..published by Virago..think I might order it.

Cancer is capricious. It picks on the young, the funny and the bright as much as on anyone else. Like a primitive god, it is random, disorderly and self-regarding. The growing number of cancer memoirs represents an attempt to impose order on lives taking off in unwanted directions. They tap into a curiosity to know what the extraordinary - but also utterly ordinary - business of cancer is like, what it means to live more openly than the rest of us with death and chance.
Which is not to say that all cancer memoirs are equally illuminating. Cancer also stalks the smug and the boring, those who think that wheatgrass juice or belief or their sheer specialness is going to get them through. Meredith Norton slyly alludes to this when she describes trying to read Lance Armstrong's bracing cancer book during her own treatment for third-stage inflammatory breast cancer. 'I bet,' she says, contrasting his success in all fields with her own feelings of inadequacy, 'he doesn't still debate what he's going to be when he grows up. I doubt that he looks at his own kids and wonders when someone else is going to pick them up.'
At the beginning of her memoir, Lopsided, the African-American Norton is living in Paris with her French husband and infant son. Concerned that one of her still lactating breasts has become 'huge, throbbing, covered with a red rash, and radiating enough heat to defrost a frozen lamb shank in 10 minutes', she sees four doctors in France, who all dismiss her symptoms. She flies home to California for a fifth opinion, where she gets a prompt diagnosis and is given a 40 per cent chance of still being alive in five years.

Norton's engrossing memoir is droll and sometimes prickly. On hearing the results of her cancer test, she notes that two strangers had just witnessed something more intimate for her than losing her virginity or giving birth. 'Death is really the only thing you do alone, no matter who is there to hold your hand. These spectators watched as I visualised my death, with probable accuracy, for the first time. And the picture was so banal.' She slips in her insights quietly, with novelistic precision.

The writing is determinedly wry and unsentimental, but real feeling seeps through. Her portrait of her affluent, noisy family is vivid and affectionate, conveying their warmth and support along with their rectitude (her father, a urologist, still corrects his adult children's grammar). When the family is gathered around the dinner table arguing loudly about how many crackers her brother can eat, her sister leans across and whispers: 'Please don't die and leave me alone with these people.'

Underlying the playfulness, though, there is a dragging sense of sadness, which no amount of humour, bathos or what Norton calls 'my own school of psychology, the School of Repression', can extinguish. She was in her thirties when she developed cancer, still convinced she was destined for great things when she could get around to them.

Her husband Thibault, complete with a French aristo sense of entitlement summed up by 'his unpronounceable, mostly silent-lettered medieval name', wants his wife's illness to teach them something, to supply some sort of revelation. 'Instead,' Norton acknowledges glumly, 'there we were, with the same annoying habits and bad manners, ungrateful, pessimistic, undisciplined and bored'. The only revelation seems to be that 'there might be no lesson in this experience; it might just suck'.

Well Cancer made me a shallower person arrived today and I have read the lot.

Yes it is funny...really funny...and really sharp and poignant too. When I read stuff like this which I can identify with my heart soars and I don't feel so alone any more. By contrast reading the latest edition of Vita with the usual run of cancer made me a better person/got me promotion/ sent me on a holiday of a lifetime stories makes me feel angry and alienated. I think probably the cancer community needs both kinds of accounts of living with cancer.

Jane

I read a ghastly article today in the Barts annual report all about a woman with breast cancer treated there who went back to work really quickly. I was treated there as well, with the same breast cancer nurse. I got back to work months earlier than she did despite getting a wound infection after the surgery there, probably cos I didn't hang about being looked after by the same nurse.

This was easy as she told me straight away that she wouldn't be there for me as she was going on her christmas holidays. So when I went in on Christmas Eve, I met one of her colleagues who knocked off at three pm. Didn't see any of them for the week or so I was in there, they were too busy looking after themselves.

The woman in the Barts article was fortunate enough to be diagnosed early enough to miss the Christmas period. She loves going back as it is just like a family now. Well well I'd go a long way to avoid that particular lot of relatives. I must get the book you mention as I've certainly not become a better person, I couldn't as I was so perfect before.

ha ha ha


Mole

you're right, snow white, I'm the wrong kind of woman too, I believe in women's liberation - I'm the wrong generation as the who so aptly put it, people try to put me down, talking bout my generation, hope I die before I get old

Mole

This thread is so great and I'm excited about reading some books that actually sound like they reflect my experience...haven't found anything so far.

Pink October struck when I was hooked up to a drip having chemo, bald as a coot with huge burns from the chemicals up both my arms. I was reading a magazine sat next to my mum where I read "Yay! We can't wait for October when all those lovely pink good are in the stores - we love having so much to choose from from all things pink and it's for a good cause too!!!"

Mum and I nearly choked - I was so mad!! I wrote an evil letter and they biked me over an apology with a good basket of organic shower gel. Dear god!

xx

Hi all - just caught up with this thread as I have been "Under The Duvet" (a great book by he way by Cathy Kelly, I think!) with a Crohn's flare and living on 3 bottles of Fortijuice a day....pity I don't like spiritis, well, they don't like me, as the drinks would taste a whole lot better.

I sometimes feel like writing to newspapers/magazines about the unvarnished truth in treating bc. I was assigned to an arrogant,patronising and rude Oncologist by my bc surgeon as "he is the best Onc we have at Derriford for bc". Well, he may be bright but has no personal skills whatsoever. I could not believe it when he said to me: "If you don't stop your methotrexate chemo for Crohn's whilst having FEC, you will die of septicaemia." He made no effort whatsoever to get peer reviews of my concurrent diseases and blithely said: "we will cross that bridge of a flare if it happens". No way Jose, I thought, and fled the room in tears, much to my husband's embarrassment. I didn't know how I was going to cope and emailed every major hospital I could think of in the US as we travelled to the US for some 30 yrs on business and had lots of contacts there - Mayo, MD Anderson, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins. etc. and although they all replied very quickly, said they had never treated a patient with those two concurrent diseases. I was in despair, not knowing whether to have the FEC chemo or not, and wrote snail mail to a Professor at St. Marks Hospital for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases in Harrow. He wrote back with experienced advice, copied the Onc and my gastro and said I must discuss his letter with both of them before attempting FEC.

When I went for my first chemo, I knew I had to see my Onc minutes beforehand for my blood test results, but couldn't face his attitude and I never discussed the Professor's letter with him, because I couldn't see the point. When I checked in, I asked the receptionist if I could see another Onc, even a registrar or house doctor, anyone but the Consultant. She didn't ask ay questions, or make a fuss, just told me to go and sit down in the waiting area. Within 15 minutes I was seen by a lovely young female GP who worked only one morning a week in the Oncology Dept - my lucky day! She was brilliant, sorted out a treatment plan with daily dexamethasone and Fortijuice, and somehow I got through those dreadful 4 months with her help. If I had had the mental energy I know I should have made a formal complaint against the original Onc, but needed my energy for myself, not fighting the NHS.

Mole - your posts really lighten my day...so laconic and pithy. Have you thought about writing an article for the media? We need people like you to tell the world that bc treatment is not "empowering".

Books - I am going to order "Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person" - sounds just like the book I need to read. Other side of the coin: when I was first diagnosed, a close American friend sent me an autographed copy of Alda Ellis's book "Beyond Breast Cancer - Our Stories of Hope and Courage". The blurb on the back cover was enough to put me off even opening it: "Sharing these stories of the women who have gone before us can light our way and give us hope"... I still haven't opened it. Well, the only people who can give me hope are well researched and intelligent, caring doctors. If anyone wants it, please PM me and I will post it on.

Jane, thank you for starting this thread - many of us are some years down the road from dx, and know what it is really like to live through horrendous treatment, the fear of a recurrence and possibly an early demise. I feel threads like this can put matters into perspective, without being maudling or self pitying.

Liz

Hi everyone,

I read the review of 'Lopsided' and thought it sounded brill - though like Jane I wondered whether it was the reviewer or the book which was so good. Would be interested to hear how you found the book, Belinda?

I just love the title 'Cancer made me a shallower person', might get it just to display on my bookshelves!

Thanks for the thread, made me smile.

Rowena

Hi Rowena..Lopsided was a good book..although I wouldn't have given it such a glowing review...but a good book, worth a read.

And I should add further - in between making me laugh out loud, it made me think - good combination.

Lyn