The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer
Mike Marquesee
Language: English
Pages: 40
ISBN: 2:00264520
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Writer and political activist Mike Marqusee was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in the summer of 2007. At first, disinclined to share his misery with others, he was reluctant to write about his illness. But he then came to realize that doing so provided a precious continuity with his life as a writer before contracting the disease, and a way of reaching out to a wider world that the illness made physically less accessible. Writing allowed him to address what he saw as a variety of insidious platitudes that surround cancer, often connected to the individualistic idea that the sufferer must be brave in battling the disease, with the inevitable corollary that those who succumb have, in some measure, brought it on themselves.
And so Marqusee begins to write about his illness. Not just his own symptoms and feelings, but the responses of friends to the news that he is ill and the way these reflect broader social attitudes towards the sick. He describes the political struggles occurring in St Bartholomew’s, the London hospital that cares for him, and the crisis in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) more generally, at a time of harrowing cutbacks. Big Pharma, whose drugs keep Marqusee alive but are sold to the NHS at prices reflecting the power and greed of a ruthless extortionist, is the subject for particularly astringent scrutiny.
The observations about cancer in these pages are never trite or sentimental. They are acute, moving, impassioned and political. And they convey important, shared truths, both personal and social, about an illness that will affect one in three people in the course of their lives.
Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery. For Blake, “moments” are constructed, acts of the imagination, “wondrous buildings.” And crucially, they are built—can only be built—in defiance of the established order and its ideology. In Blake’s terms, in defiance of “Satan, who is the god of this world” and his agents: There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found It renovates every Moment
cancer is a necessary part of having, handling, and treating cancer. To revise Tolstoy, all healthy people are alike, all unhealthy people are unhealthy after their own fashion. We are all variants from a norm; that’s why we’re being treated. So there are no uniform rules of the game when it comes to talking to friends or acquaintances who have cancer about their condition. Take “you’re looking well” or variants thereof: sometimes people do get a boost from such remarks, or are at least relieved
Years of consultation and delay followed. The government insisted that finance for the project should be provided exclusively from the private sector, in keeping with its favoured Private Finance Initiative (PFI), through which consortia of banks, building firms, and developers finance and build hospitals, which are then leased back to the NHS over thirty or more years, at a handsome and guaranteed rate of profit. As the projected PFI costs for the Barts project soared, in early 2006 the
of information between patient and doctor is a scientific necessity, and a reluctance to complain inhibits it. Earlier this year, Barack Obama vowed to “launch a new effort to conquer a disease that has touched the life of nearly every American.” In so doing, he was intensifying and expanding a “war on cancer” first declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. For all the billions subsequently spent by the U.S., British, and other governments, progress in that “war” has been fitful. The age-adjusted
the heart. I had reached a stage where I was desperate for a diagnosis, any diagnosis (or so I thought). When the GP phoned to ask me to come to the clinic to discuss my blood test results, I knew the news would not be good. I wasn’t shocked when he explained that the test revealed a high level of something called “paraproteins,” indicative of a malignancy. He also observed that I looked terrible, and referred me to the nearby Homerton Hospital for urgent examination. Before we parted he wrote