In an early shot from Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell, the camera focuses on the movie’s elderly protagonist in what is clearly a medical setting. In Wang’s script, the acting directions state that “Nai Nai sits alone in a hospital gown awaiting her X-ray.” There, “she has a coughing fit.” Although a disconnected arm…
Tag: cancer
Book Review: Cancer and Caregiving in Heart the Lover by Lily King
In Heart the Lover, Lily King does the unimaginable: she crafts the perfect coming-of-age college love story, and then unravels and complicates it with a temporal jump into the future, a reunion sobered by time and cancer. Always a genius when it comes to capturing physical experiences on the page, King conjures cancer’s daily horrors…
But who cares for the carer?
A few months ago, I offered a Graphic Medicine workshop at an event geared towards those who provide care to their loved ones impacted by cancer. The premise: for caregivers to use art, color, and words to reflect on their support systems and consider ways of broadening and deepening the connections which those systems comprise….
Book Review: Entry Points into Serious Illness and Facial Disfigurement through Kathleen Watt’s “Rearranged”
“Don’t be afraid of the blood and guts,” Kathleen Watt smiled while signing a copy of her book: “there are many entry points.” Watt, a former New York City opera singer, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer that initially filled the space behind her right cheekbone and continued to spread—“occupying the space where…
Review: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
When Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was published by Alice James Press last year, I couldn’t put it down—and after I finished reading through it, I didn’t want to put it down. I kept it in my car as I drove to the National Institutes of Health for a bioethics fellowship;…
Under the Surface
I’ve only seen it a few times. I don’t mean when you pass someone at the grocery store, their head covered in a silk turban, pale skin, no eyebrows. I mean at close range—when it’s beyond repair. The first time was ten years ago, an older Taiwanese woman brought in by her concerned daughter. In…
Book Review: Sergio Loo, Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body. Translated by Will Stockton (2019)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller // No one deserves cancer. In his translator’s note of Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body (2019), Will Stockton references Susan Sontag’s critiques of the tendency to conceptualize illness as a metaphor. In Illness as a Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Sontag poignantly challenges…
Hope on Trial
Sarah Roth // My parents shared a broad, brown desk in their home office. In the years of my mother’s struggle with ovarian cancer, a foot of papers, envelopes, and printouts were stacked on the desk, documenting clinical trials for which she might be eligible. For a time, the desk, with its thick layer of…
There’s more to cancer treatment than survival.
Steve Server // Cancer is conceptually as well-circumscribed as a tumor feels when you palpate it under the skin during a routine exam. Its hardness imprints itself upon your sensorium, and then upon your psyche, as you feel the burden of the unpleasant truth that must soon make itself known. Dense, solid, almost like a…
Rethinking the Language of Cancer Diagnosis
Steffi Mac // Recently, I was introduced to a young doctor who had survived cancer and who is now working on Covid-19 duty. I wanted to interview her in order to present her narrative in my online initiative for cancer survivors, The Marrow Story. I was also trying to understand the health care system of…