What Can a Cancer Patient Learn from Tolstoy? Book Thursday.

Seeds. Radioactive. Professor. What Can a Cancer Patient Learn from Tolstoy?

Table 1. Side-effects and effects on recovery ...

Side Effects of Prostate Cancer

It is perhaps no surprise that an English professor, Stewart Justman, would turn to literature to find answers when he is diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Not medical answers, of course. He listens to his doctors, does his

research, and ultimately agrees to the recommended radiation seeds, brachytherapy.

He met with his doctor, after a biopsy, to discuss a course of treatment, on September 12, 2001.

But, for the larger question of how he reconciles the fact that he feels and looks healthy and that even his cancer treatments do not reveal the diagnosis to any but those he informs, he turns to literature.

Meaningless Events

Justman compares a cancer diagnosis like his with Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”

The comparison seems apt in this sense: some inconsequential and unnoted event became a life-threatening condition.

Ivan fell off a stepladder hanging curtains. It is only after he does not recover from the fall that doctors realize his condition is terminal.

Justman had no reason to suspect he was a candidate for prostate cancer. It was not in his family, though his son now has double the risk.

The common explanations of stress, poor diet and environmental conditions did not seem to apply.

In any event, he found these explanations troubling as he could not undo the past and reversing them was not known to be curative.

Life’s Meaning

There is a second lesson to be learned from Tolstoy, however.

People can come to a greater awareness of meaning in their lives and the people close to them when facing a life-threatening illness.

Justman did not find support groups helpful, but did find that concern for his wife often motivated him to work harder on his recovery to cause her less distress.

Though he was grateful to his doctor for not suggesting cancer as an opportunity for personal growth, he recognizes its possibility through Tolstoy’s timeless story.

The final lesson is that life is always more complicated than portrayed in public reports.

Not only is a cancer journey singularly individual, but its many details cannot be fully represented by anyone else’s description.

Public Awareness, Private Journey

For the question of how he reconciles his discomfort with the public awareness campaigns of cancer and his own private struggle, he turns to the history of how we came to bring cancer and its patients into the spotlight.

Justman provides an historical look at a time in the 1950s and 1960s when a cancer diagnosis was nearly always terminal. At that time, doctors sometimes did not inform their patients of their diagnosis.

If nothing could be done, then what could be gained by informing them, compared to the devastating news that would mar what time they had left?

This approach was reversed in the 1970s, not just because we now have real options and decisions to make, but because it is thought cruel not to give someone knowledge that gives them a choice of how to spend their days.

For all Justman’s discomfort at the public awareness of cancer, and the dropping of shame surrounding visible treatment effects, as bald women participate in runs for fund-raising, he provides a review of the literature that marked a cultural trend toward transparency over paternalistic secrets.

The openness of the discussion of cancer continues this trend.

Where Is He Now?

An English professor at the University of Montana, Stewart Justman has written another book about prostate cancer since his 2003 “Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer.”

His 2008 book is titled “Do No Harm: How a Magic Bullet for Prostate Cancer Became a Medical Quandry.”

He has also written several articles for medical journals on the subject, including, “Uninformed Consent: Mass Screening for Prostate Cancer” in 2010.

On Thursdays, we review books by and for cancer survivors and classic children’s books. Click here to keep getting this blog in your Reader.

To you and the precious days in your future.

Carol Covin, “Granny-Guru”

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

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