Treatment of this cruel disease has advanced hugely in recent years, but writers from Philip Roth to Christopher Hitchens show the awful human cost it still exacts
My relationship to cancer is professional but also personal, such that the terms used to characterise it – doctor, oncologist, investigator – can be added to, unhappily, by the words nephew, grandson, friend and son. Being a doctor is no protection of course, and can even, I’ve found, be spectacularly unhelpful. Nothing drains objectivity more than a family member’s name in the top left hand corner of the CT scan you search for confirmation, or for the signs of spread and damage. For years, I could also add the term “writer”, but only in secret, working at it in the morning before going to work, the way some people do their yoga or run.
With the publication of my novel This Living and Immortal Thing, this secret is less zealously held and even to be publicised. Perhaps it will not matter. Perhaps I’ll be fired when it’s found out.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment