Take Off Your Running Shoes

On the arrogance of doctors

This is Aaron Sorkin on the self-esteem of doctors. So Bartlet, Sorkin's fictional American President in his TV series The West Wing, is meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the various other highest folk in the land, before preparing to launch an air strike and he says:

BARTLET
Keep your seats. There’s a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken
in the Blue Room. You wouldn’t think you could find a group of people more arrogant
than the fifteen of us, but there they are right upstairs in the Blue Room.

Kinship

Here, a piece about L. Lee Lowe, one of this blog's regular commenters, and someone I met entirely through blogging. Online, you can hear and/or read Lowe's teenage fiction, which she talks about in the piece.

Case in point: L. Lee Lowe, an American-born fiction writer who lives in Germany. Since July, Lowe has been publishing her young-adult novel Mortal Ghost in weekly installments on her blog. After all the chapters have been posted, the novel will be available for free download as a PDF.

"What distinguishes the online medium for me," said Lowe - in, appropriately enough, an e-mail interview - "is the immediate feedback from readers, and the sense of kinship between reader and writer which can develop."

Blogging 101

Another theme of New January newspaper coverage is blogging as the new diary-keeping. In the Observer, Simon Garfield writes about finding the diary his mother's nurse kept while caring for his mother during her breast cancer:

I'm not quite sure who it was written for; perhaps it was for another nurse taking over, perhaps it was for me.

Read the rest of the diary/blogging piece here.

Virtual dinner parties

In that virtual dinner party - the authors we stack next to our beds - I have Jane Smiley chatting to John Updike, which will lead to some rebarbative dialogue, but in between attacking each other they can compare their takes on cancer. His here. And hers, from At Paradise Gate:

"...after the operation [to remove lung cancer] the doctors were jubilant. They said they had caught it in time, and they had done a beautiful job. Those were their exact words, 'Mrs. Crane, we did a beautiful job.' ...Anyway it was discovered that Geo had a brain tumour not quite two years later, and the same doctor from before said, 'Well Mrs Crane, we can't be sure, but it may be that a few cells escaped from the earlier operation. In this case they would go to the brain.' And he smiled slightly. I don't think he meant to. I was there, because Claire suspected what the news would be, and she didn't want to go in alone. I wish I could describe his tone of voice. It was as if he were smiling, and saying, 'That's life!' and shrugging his shoulders. And that's when Claire began to get bitter. That very moment."

This seems to me a pretty exact description of what happens after operations to remove cancer. But I may just be bitter.

Useful stuff

And this seems to me the clearest, most helpful advice I've read on how to manage the doctor-patient relationship. There's so much talk about 'patient choice' and my immediate reaction is always, 'who wants choice, just tell me the cure!' but if you have to be put in the awful position of having to make your own choices, in a field in which you have no expertise, this set of guidelines seems good.

Poetic illness

There's this discussion about what poems people treasure by heart, and somebody mentions Dulce et Decorum Est with its line

of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues

.

I learnt the Owen poem by heart at school, and it's stayed with me, but I'd forgotten that line. Now, reading it, reading Owen on mustard gas sores, knowing about chemotherapy, as I also do these days, and how it was developed after the First World War when they realised that soldiers who'd been exposed to mustard gas had decreased white blood cells, and so they figured they could use the same stuff to destroy cancer cells. If you happen to be on chemotherapy now, then you'll know about the blisters it causes in your mouth. Rereading the poem now it's also odd to see that the phrase before the one about incurable sores on innocent tongues, reads "obscene as cancer"...because of course when Owen wrote it he couldn't know the connection.

Gold shoe outings

I tell one story of the Julia Pascal launch here, although I've left out the fact that Oona King adopted a baby four months ago, who is now seventeen months old, and also how when I said to her how surprised I was to learn that she is Miriam Stoppard's niece, she laughed and said, "everybody says that" and told me that her mother contributed "lots" to her sister, Miriam Stoppard's, various books on parenting.

Also, that when I said to Edwina Currie, that I'd seen her talking about the archive on television with her daughter and baby granddaughter, and how calm the baby had been on camera, how relaxed about being handed from lap to lap, she said; "ah yes, a girl who's destined to be Davina McCall," a whole new kind of ambition for Jewish grandmothers to nurse for their descendants.

Explains a lot...

A Japanese research team has discovered that chemotherapy shrinks the brain. This is very good, and very timely too, because this Thursday I'm on a panel with Oona King and Edwina Currie to talk about mothers and daughters, ordinarily a subject on which you can't get me to shut up, but should I become tongue-tied at the LJCC Thursday 30th November at 6pm I'll just say, errr, can't remember what I'll just say, but ehh, something anyhow...

Pity my Doctors

Peter Ostler, my oncologist, measures the red marks - which is what cancer looks like apparently - on my chest, with a pair of calipers. Each time he does this the measurements go up a centimeter or two.
"You're right," he says, "it's getting bigger. But it's not something for us to worry about." And then, because, poor guy, he's blogged about and written about in a national newspaper, not to mention the subject of a forthcoming book, he leans back against the windowsill, takes a deep breath, and says: "I mean, I know...uh, I've seen a doctor use that phrase with a woman, and she said to him - which I quite understand - 'it's all very well for you saying that, but you don't have to live with these disfiguring marks...'" and he looks at me with a mix of compassion and bewilderment as to whether it's possible for doctors to ever get it right.

I say, "so you mean these marks at least, are not life-threatening?" "Exactly," he answers, with a huge sigh of relief. Message sent and understood. "Well, that's all I care about," I say.

Oscitant but exultant!!!

Book is finished! The very last of all 70-something thousand absolutely last words written, and, thanks to all of you, it is already being discounted on Amazon (apparently this is a good thing, it means it is selling...) I had to take new drugs this week, moving on to capecitabine and consequently completely beat, or as I learnt this week, oscitant, which means yawning. So now you know.

But I did get to a book launch tonight where the rights person from Bloomsbury told me about Janet Reibstein's book describing how she'd had a mastectomy because so many of the women in her family had breast cancer. Reibstein has, apparently, stayed well, though the book did "so-so".

Meanwhile, our TV is fixed - did you know Sky boxes are made by Alan The Apprentice Sugar's Amstrad? As the repair guy said, "we just chuck them out and replace them with new ones...". Lights are still broken, and our bath is now leaking into the room below, but who cares...I finished the book!!