Christina Middlebrook

This is a memoir from a woman who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in her late 40s back in the early 90s. While MBC is still not a great diagnosis, the treatment options were extremely limited 30 years ago. Middlebrook undertook a grueling experimental therapy of high dose chemo followed by a stem cell transplant in order to buy herself a few years (Note: this kind of treatment isn't done anymore -- after many breast cancer patients and doctors pushed for access to the expensive and intense treatment before results of clinical trials were available, it was ultimately found not to statistically increase overall survival). She brings the reader through her treatment experience, the fear and stress of waiting for a progression that she knew would eventually come, and the struggles of facing her mortality in her early 50s.

Middlebrook was a Jungian psychologist and I particularly liked the final chapter ("The Dier") and her discussion of the Ego vs. the Psyche. A quote: My ego holds as tenaciously to life as anyone else's. I cannot imagine this world without me in it, or at least I couldn't in the beginning. There is nothing I, or any soldier or doctor or commander-in-chief, any director of hematology oncology or the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the oncogene, can do to change how bad I feel about dying in my fifties. My only ally is surrender. I find great relief in surrender. Surrender means I can stop worrying and fretting and figuring out what I am supposed to do. I can forget about beating odds and just live my life. I don't need to work harder than I already have, I tell myself, because I have already done everything that I can and because I didn't do anything wrong in the first place.

This book was published in 1996 and Middlebrook unexpectedly ended up living until the age of 67, dying in 2009. This is both a very personal memoir of a specific woman and her family and treatment decisions at a specific time in history, and also a universal exploration of living with a terminal illness. She does not mince words or hold back her anger and frustration. She can also be very funny and an astute and uncompromising observer of both herself and others. I found a lot I could relate to here, and I really liked Middlebrook's writing style. Recommended for fans of potentially depressing cancer memoirs!… (lisätietoja)

This book is about one woman's experience with breast cancer. Although I don't have cancer, I found the book important on several levels. It helps those of us who haven't been through it understand what it's like and more importantly, how we should change our behavior toward anyone with a terminal illness. Patients who have fought breast cancer will identify with some of this, but many breast cancers can be beaten. If you or someone you know has metastatic cancer and/or has had a stem cell transplant, the book will speak to you. Although every person's experiences are different, and Christina speaks to that at the end of the book, the truths shine through the pages to all of us, not only cancer patients. We need to face death, whether our own or that of a loved one, and stop trying to deny it. The pat-pat, it's going to be all right approach is an insult to a terminal patient. If we're healthy, we need to stop thinking of ourselves, protecting ourselves, and understand and care about what the terminal patient goes through, both physical and mental. We can't be in their shoes, but we can do a lot better than most of us do now. This is a powerful book, honest, not tiptoeing around the subject. It's one person's experience that we can learn from. People with serious illness need people who will listen and do simple, loving things; they don't necessarily need to hear rah-rah positive words all the time.… (lisätietoja)

Trained as a Jungian analyst, Christina Middlebrook offers an unflinching and unsentimental first hand look at facing death in SEEING THE CRAB. Diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer at age fifty, she takes her readers through nearly four years of treatment, including her radical mastectomy, and grueling months of chemo and radiation therapy, and, later, "daily blood pheresis to collect peripheral stem cells" - a painful process called, interestingly, "a rescue." The original cancer metastasized to her spine after only ten months requiring months more treatment.

After a bone marrow transplant, Middlebrook tells us -

"Transplant pain is with me every day: bone pain, joint pain, foot pain, esophageal pain, headaches, earaches, jaw pain, edema pain, tooth pain, bruised shins, difficulty swallowing, difficulty eliminating, heart fibrillations, shortness of breath, fatigue, fatigue, fatigue."

She spares her reader nothing, describing marathon bouts of barfing, puke every color imaginable, as well as chemo- and drug-induced fogs, hours, whole days lost to her.

She also talks of the importance of family support, angry at first with her mother and sister, who stay mostly in denial of the seriousness of her illness. But she is grateful to her husband and children, as well as stepchildren (her husband has been married twice before, she once). She is disgusted with the people who avoid the whole issue of cancer and try to simply wish it away with comments like, "oh, you'll be fine," or worse.

This is a hard book to read, and not one I would normally even pick up. I found it at a library book sale, paged through it, and was struck by the quality of the writing and its stark honesty. Had to buy it, had to read it. Women who have had breast cancer would probably relate easily, but I think it's the kind of book the men in their lives should read too - to better understand what their loved ones are going through. And I purposely leave that in present tense, because cancer is not something you can ever really put behind you. Christina Middleton's memoir of cancer and dying is proof positive of that.

The only section of the book I found not quite so compelling was the final one in which the author philosophizes about death and how her Jungian training has figured into her illness. I did some skimming there.

Ironically, although Middlebrook was sure she would not survive her illness and its quick recurrence, she lived another fifteen years. She died in January of 2009. Her online obituary does not give a cause of death.

This is a book that needs to be read. Highly recommended.… (lisätietoja)