Sunday, November 28

Hi Friends,

I’m sitting here this evening playing with iTunes and making up my last chemo playlist. Thanks to everyone who suggested songs on the blog and by email – the list thus far is varied, and it will make me cry and dance and think of how lucky I am to have you all in my life.

Catherine and I have been reading your books and poetry and listening to your music. I have also been listening to audiobooks while in bed, and I have been surprised by the types of books that have drawn me in. I started in September with Ruth Rakoff’s new book “When My World Was Very Small,” which is her account of managing her breast cancer treatments (I believe I mentioned that book here before). I then read a few books similar to that one, people’s accounts of dealing with cancer and treatment, especially chemotherapy. I found them oddly comforting. It’s not that I wanted to hear about their suffering undergoing chemo, but, yes, I wanted to hear about their suffering undergoing chemo. They made me feel like I had company. Then last weekend I read a review of a new book on cancer entitled “The Emporer of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and downloaded it. Reading that book makes me feel so utterly not alone. And incredibly fortunate. Mukherjee gives a history of cancer and its treatments starting with the Greeks who used to attribute cancer to black bile, one of the four humors. Drain that out and cancer will disappear. It’s incredible how long that notion stood up in the medical books and how gross those techniques were (shudder). He then traces cancer treatments alongside the development of surgical techniques (he gives horrific descriptions of cowboy surgeons performing radical mastectomies on patients who are strapped down with insufficient anaesthetics, sometimes just alcohol), developments in radiation, then chemotherapy. Hearing stories of wire placed on hospital windows so that long-term chemo patients don’t attempt suicide jumps makes me grateful to be sitting in my own little warm home, even if I am in some pain. The treatments were so different even a few decades ago, it makes me thankful to be dealing with this illness in the early 21^st century. Even last week I was Skyping with my parents and my father, who lost his voice box to cancer 14 years ago, told me that his new oncologist gave him an exam and admitted that he had never seen that radical a procedure in his recent training (they took a lot of muscle and tissue in his neck, shoulders, and throat and he now breathes through a stoma and suffers from quite a bit of pain). Today it’s a totally different protocol. Anyway, this book recounts some of the progress and setbacks of cancer treatments, and I can only read it during the day – some of the images slipped into my dreams and it wasn’t pretty. But it’s quite gripping reading for anyone interested in that aspect of medical history.

Much love,

Kip