![]() ![]() One of the most difficult moments in The Undying happens when Boyer questions whether she deserved her costly treatments. It's a choice made under duress, because the only other option is to "die of your own cellular proliferation." "Choosing chemotherapy is like choosing to jump off a building when someone is holding a gun to your head," Boyer reminds us. Gamely submit to "the calamity of medicine." The Undying draws attention to the coercive nature of this role, and of modern oncology treatment in general. ![]() Women with breast cancer become quickly acquainted with a set of mandates: "Exercise when tired, eat when repulsed by food, go to yoga, do not mention death." Eliminate all traces of a negative attitude. This sort of self-management is required to establish one's virtue as a sick woman, and sympathy equals currency in a country where our medical care is too frequently crowd-funded. To this set of verbs, Boyer adds "wrecked," "mutilated," and "corroded," as well as "harvested, amputated, implanted, punctured, weakened, and infected, often all at once." But Boyer did not suffer simply because "terrible things happening in my body." She laments, as well, the social imperative to endure such things with "good humor" and gratitude - the affective performance that breast cancer patients are tasked with, in which "we are expected to keep our unhappiness to ourselves but donate our courage to everyone." Since at least the 1990s, activists have used the phrase "slash, burn, and poison" to emphasize the horrors of breast cancer treatment, referring to mastectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy. In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, and Barbara Ehrenreich, Boyer declares: "Disease is never neutral. The experience of being a patient is poetically rendered readers who have undergone serious medical crises will immediately recognize the sense of feeling like a wounded, abandoned animal, an experiment, and an object, like "a car with parts that falling off." But this misery, Boyer suggests, is not the inevitable result of the disease process itself it's manmade, a product of both capitalism and culture. ![]() The Undying catalogs the unceasing losses that accompany a breast cancer diagnosis in the 21st century. But it can't guarantee that your cancer won't ultimately kill you. It can melt the linoleum of a clinic floor, it causes your hair to fall out and your fingernails to painfully lift from their beds. The drug destroys the "white and grey matter of my brain," Boyer writes. Today's standard of care, for instance, still includes a chemotherapy drug called Adriamycin, which has been used since 1974 and is known as "the Red Devil" because its ruby hue can discolor a patient's bodily fluids. What she learned while undergoing treatment and its aftermath was an entirely different story, an experience marked by physical and psychic agony lyrically detailed in her new book, The Undying, a rousing hybrid of memoir and manifesto.įor all of the awareness campaigns, symbolized by the pink ribbon, and the "extraordinary production of language" that has replaced the silence and stigma once attached to breast cancer, Boyer discovered that startlingly little progress towards a cure has been made. How?īefore poet Anne Boyer got breast cancer at age 41, she believed, like most people unacquainted with the disease, that it "was no longer deadly and that its treatment had been made easy.your life gets a little interrupted but then you get through." Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Undying Subtitle Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care Author Anne Boyer ![]()
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