Book report 16
By A. Bae Hel
Some heavy books this report, but life isn’t always flowers and fairies. Sometimes you must veer into the darkness to understand the light.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
5 years ago when I found the lump my initial thoughts were not that this was cancer. In fact, I pretty much ignored it for several months assuming it was related to something else entirely. When I brought it up to my GP about 6 months later she waved it away as well. It was only 6 months after that when I returned to her and said it was getting bigger that she took a closer look and with a stricken look said she was sorry and hustled me off into the jet stream of cancer.
I have always liked to understand what the hell is going on. I like details and knowing the secret knowledge of healthcare. So, before I saw her this last time I had begun googling possible things it could be. I can up with some fairy obscure and rare cancers, so was PREPARED. I knew I had cancer, just what type remained to be determined.
Know your enemy is essential advice for all kinds of things and I was fortunate to have a very well-rounded experience in healthcare that gave me a lot of broad knowledge on various different specializations. I entered into the battle with my cells secure with an understanding of what was to happen.
Trying not to die is exhausting and traumatizing beyond anything I ever expected. I could not have read this book until now. During my Trying-not-to-die period I could not have held the concepts in my befuddled brain.
Initially I was a bit put off because it seemed the entire book would be about cancer discoveries in America, but fortunately he rapidly delved into the history of cancer. Going back to ancient mummies and records of early surgeries built the bedrock of the dramatic options to come.
This is a very sciency book. Extreme science. Details of cell division, genetic codes, drug mechanisms of actions on the cells are interspersed with narratives about the people who not only sought to treat and find a cure, but the patients they struggled to save. It is also deeply traumatic. It does not gloss over the horrors that was the early radical surgery protocol and the zeal with which those surgeons approached a mass. Similarly with the early radiation treatment regimes and discovering of how to poison right up to the edge of death.
The writing is often beautiful and full of compassion as well as science. The level of details is often into the textbook genre, but in spite of this, the biography of cancer brings the disease into the personal realm. We will all be touched by this and the desire to understand the hows and whys driving those looking for a cure. Can you skip over the parts about genetic code details mutations on which genes turn it on or off? Absolutely! You can still come away from this book with a more profound understanding of the enemy that lurks within us all.
Nobody’s Girl
Virgina Roberts Giuffre
This is a difficult book to read. Yet Virgina herself acknowledges that and asks us not to stop. Take a break, takes as many breaks as you need, but please hear her story.
Very likely you have heard her name before and you know she spoke up about being trafficked by that billionaire to other billionaires, yet her story is so much more than that. It is a story of how such abuse as a child will form who you become and how you respond. It is about how trauma shapes us and about how difficult the struggle is to break free of the bonds which constrain those trafficked and abused.
Virginia shows us such courage and bravery. She knows that she will be cast as the whore and a liar by very powerful people, and who has ever known the powerful to lie? She steps up and refuses to accept that tag. She built a new life. One with a burning to ensure these monsters are held accountable.
We continue to wait for that accountability to happen.
The book ends with a hopeful note in 2024. Can it possibly be more tragic to discover that behind this hope was continuing abuse at the hands of the man she portrayed as supportive and loving. Her need to matter, to find protection and safety even though she could speak out about past abuses would not allow her to name the one she protected for so long. I find this the ultimate tragedy of her life.
