Intoxicated By My Illness

"Anatole Broyard was editor of The New York Times book review – a highly literate man, linguistically brilliant and a wonderful prose stylist. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer fairly young. This book is a collection of essays he published in the The New York Times about his illness. He has a gentle irreverence about the medical process which is comforting after you’ve read a lot of medical memoirs. He says things like: “My first urologist, who was quite famous, wanted to cut off my testicles but I thought this was admitting defeat right at the outset.” And then he describes all the terrible things he had to go through to get his prostate cancer treated. He says, I would like a doctor who is not only a talented physician but a bit of a metaphysician too, someone who can treat me body and soul. “To get to my body my doctor has to get to my character. He has to go through my soul. He doesn’t only have to go through my anus.” Oh yes. He writes a penetrating account of what it’s like to have a bone scan, looking for metastases of your cancer. He writes about what’s going through his mind as he lay under a huge machine that scans all your bones looking for ‘evidence of treason’. “There’s a horror movie appeal to this machine. Beneath it, you become the Frankenstein monster exposed to the electric storm.” I appreciate this book for its irreverence, the elegance of its prose and because the essays in it are succinct, punchy, with the tyrannical discipline that newspaper journalism has to have. And I like the idea. Yes, he writes I want doctor who is a good reader of illness. I cling to my belief in criticism, which is the chief discipline of my own life. I secretly believe that criticism can wither cancer….When you die your body dies with you so I want a metaphysical man to keep you company. I want a doctor with a sensibility, and that seems almost like a contradiction in terms. Many books on illness tell the reader about the waking life of the cancer patient but not about daydreams or fantasies, or how illness transfigures you. Broyard writes: You wouldn’t know that inside every ill person there’s a Kafka character, a Han Castrop trying to get out, But there are books about illness that are too eloquent, full of chanting and dying falls that piously sound as if they were written on tiptoe. To be ill is to be an odd mixture of pathos and bathos, comedy and terror with intervals of surprise, and to treat it too respectfully is to fall into the familiar traps of Romantic agony. That idea of the pathos and the bathos is a lovely one, and it’s very close to my own experience. Sometimes medical consultations can be really humorous, funny, and I find myself laughing with my patients about the absurdity of the human situation. That you can have all these best laid plans about how your life is going to go and then — wham — 55, and you’ve got metastatic prostate cancer. And of course that’s a terrible terrible thing, but it’s a natural human thing to turn situations of high tension into comedy, because that’s how we cope. And that’s what I love about Broyard. He does it with such panache."