Bearing Witness: Living with Ovarian Cancer

Bibliography

Elit, L., Charles C., Gold I., Gafni A., Farrell, A., Tedford S., Dal Bello D., Whelan T. “Women’s Perceptions about Treatment Decision Making for Ovarian Cancer.” Gynaecological Oncology 88:2 (2003): 90–95. This article describes a qualitative study of women’s role in the treatment decision-making process once they had received the initial diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Many women reported that they felt they had no say in the course of treatment and felt directed by their physician. The article argues for shared decision making. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis , and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Shoshana and Laub bring together their expertise in the fields of literary criticism and psychiatry to pose comprehensive questions concerning relationships “between narrative and history, between art and memory, [and] between speech and survival” (xiii). In a series of essays that examine various aspects of the Holocaust, they are “looking not so much for answers as for new enabling questions” that may inform broader contexts (xvi). A diagnosis of ovarian cancer exemplifies one such “broader context” because of its inherent and often imminent threat of death. The relationship between speech and survival may be significant in the context of ovarian cancer. In fact, other authors in this list theorize about the various conditions and mechanisms that do tie the two closely together. As Laub explains in the chapter “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” not telling one’s story “serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny … [as] events become more and more distorted in their silent retention and pervasively invade and contaminate the survivor’s daily life” (79). For those diagnosed with a terminal illness, “survival” on a daily basis becomes paramount for as long as the illness allows. As a survival tool, narrating the “something that happened to me” is important indeed. 87 Bibliography Prepared by Geraldine Lavery Fitch, Margaret I., and Fran Turner. You Are Not Alone: A Guide for Canadian Women Living with Ovarian Cancer. Toronto: National Ovarian Cancer Association, 2003. This publication is an excellent source of information regarding the issues that women newly diagnosed with ovarian cancer and their families face. The authors have also included references to many more primary information sources, some of them accessible via the Internet. Working with multiple contributors, Fitch and Turner provide a way to learn the language of ovarian cancer, from diagnostic terms such as “grading and staging” to “peripheral neuropathy,” a condition that may develop during chemotherapy. Having the tool of language is important for those facing this life-threatening disease because it facilitates discussion between the patient and medical professionals as well as between the patient and her family and friends. There is some comfort in being able to make informed choices, and to be informed means learning a new medical language. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. “Between the Ride and the Story: Illness and Remoralization.” http://www .ucalgary.ca/~frank/ride/html This article describes the depersonalization and technologization of modern medicine and its effects on patients using Weberian language of disenchantment . Mathieson, Cynthia, and Henderikus J. Stam. “Renegotiating Identity: Cancer Narratives.” Sociology of Health and Illness 17:3 (1995): 283–396. The authors refuse to privilege either cancer or its narratives in their careful theoretical balancing act. They work to show on the one hand how the narratives of cancer patients are sometimes mediated by an interview process, and on the other, how endeavours in the area of psychosocial oncology have borrowed a little too much from a medical model. Psychosocial oncology represents a kind of medical colonization of storytelling in that it uses “psychiatric indices to assess the impact of the disease” (285). The authors offer a model of storytelling for cancer patients using “open-ended identity questions” (included in the article) to encourage patients to reflect on the experience of cancer. They conclude with the useful observation that “current controversies about narrative analysis in the social sciences are … an attempt to view the culture of illness from the lives of the ill rather than from the perspective of the researcher or the medical system” (302). 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY Miller, Nancy K. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives. New York: Colombia University Press, 2002. Miller’s book is a charming, lively, and often amusing account of her own reactions...