Cancer: My Body Is No Longer Mine: Patient First, Person Second?
You are not the cancer in room nineteen. You are the person in room nineteen who happens to have cancer. There is a difference. This book insists on it.
At some point during treatment, the author was referred to as "the cancer in room nineteen." Not maliciously. Not even carelessly - just conversationally, the way you might say "the appointment at two." Efficient. Entirely reasonable, if you are the kind of person who does not have cancer and therefore does not notice that the cancer in room nineteen is sitting right there, listening to every word.
Cancer: My Body Is No Longer Mine is an honest, funny, and deeply humane account of what it actually feels like to have your body become a medical object while you are still very much inside it. Written from the inside - with love, and mild outrage - this book covers the things nobody quite prepares you for: the hospital gown (a design failure of spectacular proportions), the small sheet that fools nobody, the progression from nice underwear to functional underwear, the narrated examination, the Cancer Tourist, white coat syndrome, and how to remain a person when the system is designed to move bodies efficiently.
This is not a book about staying positive. It is a book about staying yourself - specific, named, and opinionated - in a system that finds it easier to call you room nineteen.
If you have had cancer, or are going through it now, you will recognise almost everything in here. Laugh where it's funny. Feel seen where it isn't. Both are the point.
You are still you. You are just currently on loan to the medical system. They will give you back eventually.
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