A Powerful Story
A friend of ours has leukemia, and she has to go through chemo every so often. It sounds like a horrible thing to go through, but every time I see her, she seems perfectly healthy and happy. Okay, that’s not entirely true: the last time I saw her was on election day, and she was pretty grumpy about the way things were going, especially because she is also a gay woman in a comitted relationship, and the anti-gay-marriage folks went 11 for 11.
Anyway, I never ask about the cancer or the treatment or anything because I don’t need to know, and, honestly, I don’t want to know. Same thing with a coworker whose mother just pased away after losing a battle with cancer. Things appear normal from the outside, if perhaps a bit more stressed, but while I know there is more going on, I don’t want the details. It’s too much.
This story, told in what is becoming one of my favorite mediums, is a very powerful, succinct story of one family’s battle with their mother’s cancer. I’ve never read Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year, but I expect it is a similar, more detailed story. Mom’s Cancer gives a taste of what is involved in a battle with cancer, and it is bitter. The story is powerful, and it is absolutely worth reading.
November 23rd, 2004 at 12:53 pm
wow — that’s a great story. you should include a warning about not starting to read it if you’ve got work to do. i couldn’t pull myself away.
November 23rd, 2004 at 7:25 pm
Um, is it beating a dead horse to get Mom to read this?
“5 reasons for the lung cancer: Smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking and smoking.”
Well, shit. My med-school friend said the only thing he really learned in his first semester of med-school was: smoking is REALLY bad for you (everything else was review). He told me that for a while, all he saw when he was confronted with smokers were walking corpses. If there were one thing he would tell people to do for their health, it wouldn’t be to exercise or stretch daily, but to not smoke.
And I have to second what Jon said. It almost made me cry at work, too. That’s probably OK, but I’d rather not have to explain that I was reading a comic.
December 10th, 2004 at 12:50 pm
Just to update. This particular friend is finished with chemo and doing well. Things are looking up!