Ordinary Life
A Memoir of Illness (Conversations in Medicine and Society)
1 edition
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Word Count
68,000 words, Guess
Page Count
272 pages
Physical Format
Paperback
Identifiers
- Open LibraryOL9655446M
- ISBN-139780472032358
- ISBN-100472032356
- OCLC Control Number77503793
- OCLC Control Numberordinarylifememo00conw_803
and 3 more
- Library of Congress Control Number2006050014
- Goodreads782690
- LibraryThing5632261
Classifications
- LCCRC279.6.C66 A3 2007
- DDC362.1/96994/0092
- LCCRC279.6.C66 A3 1997
Description
In this compelling account written from within an illness, Kathlyn Conway gives us a deeply honest description of her own struggle with breast cancer and its many reverberations through her everyday life, bringing us to the heart of the experience of illness without preachiness or sentimentality. Conway did not experience cancer as a means for reevaluating her life, but rather as a terrible threat to her future and that of her family. Making difficult choices among treatment possibilities, dealing with nurses, doctors, and lab technicians, undergoing a mastectomy, and enduring chemotherapy, Conway discovered that although she wanted to play the part of the brave, long-suffering patient, she could not. Angry and upset much of the time, overwhelmed by her situation, she found it difficult to cope even with the support her family and friends provided. In her willingness to share this story of herself as a frightened, sometimes selfish, often despairing human being, Kathlyn Conway gives us not only an unsettling portrait of our everyday mortality but a renewed appreciation of life itself.
Description
Ordinary Life is a frank portrait of one woman's experience of living through three cancers, from diagnosis through treatment and on to recovery. Unlike the usual self-help book that portrays illness as a transformative experience in which the individual ultimately prevails physically, spiritually, and socially, Ordinary Life isn't afraid to inhabit and explore the nightmare world of human emotion evoked by life-threatening disease. Kathlyn Conway shows all sides fo her reaction to a deadly illness. Often she is despairing, angry, lonely terrified, and raging against her disease and its implications. Hers is a journey to the heart of darkness into which illness can take any individual. Yet Conway's very act of ocurage and honesty in exposing her fear reveals how normal such feelings are.
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