WRITING DOCTOR'S BLOG by NYHWRITER.COM

FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT: CANCER ON $5 A DAy**(CHEMO NOT INCLUDED): HOW HUMOR GOT ME THROUGH THE TOUGHEST JOURNEY OF MY LIFE by Robert Schimmel with Alan Eisenstock

CANCER ON $5 A Day (*chemo not included): How Humor Got Me Through the Toughest Journey of My Life by Robert Schimmel with Alan Eisenstock (DeCapo Press, Lifelong, Perseus Books, March 15th, 2008).

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, at www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515.
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         “If you live long enough,” my father used to say, “a little rain has to fall on your parade.”  But it wasn’t a little rain that hit Robert Schimmel, the cheerfully bawdy, stand-up comedian. It was a tsunami. Actually, not one tsunami, but four (so who’s counting?).

         In one decade, Schimmel’s beloved son, Derek died of a brain tumor; a heart attack hit Schimmel when he wasn’t looking; and his 22-year marriage with his first wife, Vikki split acrimoniously. Finally, cancer sidelined him on the cusp of a big break in his career.

         Yet, Schimmel managed to keep his head above water and move on. Struck by stage-three non-Hodgkins lymphoma, he hit the treatment trail head on.  Though cancer is no laughing matter, Schimmel tried to make a joke—or several jokes—about what even he admits was “the toughest journey of my life, ” which he records in his brave new book,CANCER ON $5 A Day (*chemo not included): How Humor Got Me Through the Toughest Journey of My Life (DaCapo press, Lifelong Books, Perseus Books, March 15th, 2008).

         As Alan Eisenstock, Schimmel’s co-author observes, “Cancer gave Robert Schimmel more material to write about. But it also gave him more heart. The disease made him see the world through wider, wiser eyes. He became more patient, more resolute, and more conscious of the power of the moment…cancer taught him how to love what he has…and his gift, making people a laugh; to love every day he’s alive.”

        With cancer as their ill-gotten muse, Schimmel and Eisenstock wrote CANCER ON $5 A DAY. Their mission, they say, was to cheer the spirits of everyone—and anyone—fighting “the Big C.”

        Although Schimmel is one of Comedy Central’s 100 Greatest Comics, and although the publisher says that “he keeps us laughing by riffing” about all the battles engendered by fighting cancer, his book is actually not funny. Instead, it’s a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit when it refuses to give up.

         Aiming at the jokey side of cancer (if such there be), Schimmel reports on the ironies of cancer's travails, peculiar events like a wig salesman trying to sell him wigs for every spot denuded by chemotherapy (yes, every spot). He can’t get over his overwhelming desire for sex during chemotherapy. “Feeling horny,” says Schimmel, “is life-affirming.”

         But cancer’s dark night of the soul keeps breaking into the tale of his long, stormy treatment. So, too, does Schimmel’s predilection for erasable, deletable (not delectable) adjectives, which might make his journey a less appropriate trip for some cancer veterans.

         Raw language or not, Schimmel’s courage is inspiring.  For CANCER ON $5 A DAY aims at making cancer victims believe that “Schimmel got through it. Maybe there’s a chance that I can make it, too.” Of course, there are no guarantees.

        But Schimmel maintains,. “It’s those things that define who you are. That was Job’s test. Flee or fight. I chose to fight.” CANCER ON $5 A DAY is an invitation to the fight with no holds barred.

SUFFERING ISN'T LIMITED ONLY TO MAINE: A HEALING TOUCH: TRUE STORIES OF LIFE, DEATH, AND HOSPICE ed by Richard Russo

A HEALING TOUCH: TRUE STORIES OF LIFE, DEATH, AND HOSPICE, ed. Richard Russo (Down East Books, April, 2008)

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, at www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com

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The impulse behind A HEALING TOUCH: TRUE STORIES OF LIFE, DEATH, AND HOSPICE, ed. Richard Russo (Down East Books, April, 2008) is salubrious—or as salubrious as tough times will permit. Its purpose is to awaken long and short-term sufferers of chronic and acute illness—and their caretakers—to the help, the surcease available from hospice care.

In its pages, Richard Russo and five other writers from Maine depict the dark worlds of individuals beset by the demons of death and disease. The stories vary from parents attempting to recover after their son’s sudden death in an auto accident to a couple trying to live with Alzheimer’s disease's depredations.

The skills of the authors also vary, with Russo's writing leading their ranks. Still, their messages are the same. They show how smart Socrates was (actually, nobody except his son ever doubted Socrates's brain power) when he said, “Count no man happy until he’s dead.” Each tale shows people flourishing only to be cut down by the evil spirits lurking on the edges of life.

This little book hones in only, albeit nobly, on the Hospice Volunteers of the Waterville (Maine) Area. The proceeds from its sales will go to the Waterville Hospice. As such, it serves the world of an individual hospice in Maine. It even seems to be a marketing tool for this specific hospice.

But tragedy doesn't limit itself to Waterville, Maine. The rest of us sufferers and caretakers  who live outside Waterville’s gray skies, may find A HEALING TOUCH’s focus too narrow to offer us the helping hand we crave. The possibility of awakening non-Maine dwellers to the varieties of surcease offered by their own local hospices is then regrettably limited.

It might be worthwhile for Down East Books to consider publishing a companion volume along these lines. Such a book would include other hospices and writers from all over the country. Individuals everywhere who have been victimized by life’s depredations could then find resources and support that they need so badly.

Meantime, readers of A HEALING TOUCH may unearth suggestions about where to find help from their local hospices. We hope so.

IT'S NOT SUCH A SECRET: THIS COMMON SECRET: MY JOURNEY AS AN ABORTION DOCTOR by Susan Wicklund (New York: Public Affairs, Jan, 2008)

Susan Wicklund. THIS COMMON SECRET: My Journey As An Abortion Doctor (New York: Public Affairs, 2008) Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, www.nyhwriter.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com 585-385-1515

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There’s an election going on (in case you hadn’t heard). Listen to Obama and Clinton, even to McCain and Huckabee perching restlessly on the cusp of the presidency. But with all their talk about CHANGE vs EXPERIENCE, what do they think when nobody’s listening? What will they do if elected? Does anyone except McCain, Bush's "true conservative," whisper a word about ABORTION? About stem cells? Or, perish the thought, about the Supreme Court repeatedly eroding Roe vs. Wade, as it "celebrates" its 35th birthday?

Yet at least 40 percent of American women—voters all--have had an abortion. Nobody talks about it although abortion is more commonly performed than tonsillectomy or pulling wisdom teeth.

Dr. Susan Wicklund’s memoir of her life, THIS COMMON SECRET (New York: Public Affairs, January, 2008), reveals the huge sacrifices demanded by her life as an abortion provider  As an innocent high-school graduate, Susan Wicklund began her fight in the abortion battles reacting against the cruelty of in her own abortion provider. Whenever the young Susan asked a question, the doctor replied, “Shut up!”

Ever after, she couldn’t shut up. She resolved to provide better care for other women in the same boat. Somehow, this feisty young girl, "poor as a church mouse," managed to become a midwife, go to college, obtain her M.D., cope with an internship's rigors, and open a general practice.  All this, while caring for her only child, Sonja.

THIS COMMON SECRET bursts with stories of Wicklund’s life (“Call me Sue,” she instructs patients) and the lives of her patients of all ages, religions, classes, backgrounds. The abortion barricades fill its pages: protesters’ omnipresent intimidation and violence stalk her. Her daughter needs a police escort to go to school.  The protesters scream imprecations at women coming to her clinic. They follow Dr. Wicklund to the airports where she travels endlessly from one remote Western clinic to another.

But she never gives up, never shuts up. She talks to, listens to every woman coming to her distant clinics. If a woman is ambivalent about abortion, if it seems she is doing this because other people are coercing her, Wicklund advises her to wait and be sure before she goes ahead.

Nonetheless, she makes a case against the 24-hour waiting period, the rules about obtaining parental consent, the Supreme Court’s increasing restrictions. The Court asserted that government  needs “to protect women from their own decisions.” This from a Court and a political party ostensibly devoted to interfering less in people’s lives.

Wicklund particularly fears “professional protesters, "mostly men, for whom protesting is a full-time obsession. They target different regions in the country or particularly vulnerable clinics. They bring their hate-filled slogans, their planes that fly over towns and cities pulling banners depicting bloody babies, their confrontational tactics. When they come to town, I wear my bulletproof vest and carry my gun. Unfortunately, their views have infiltrated the laws and policies of our country and the lives of my patients.”

Wicklund’s life is devoted to her patients, her own choices in the war over choice. But fighting battles for women deserving the right to safe, legal abortions has been enormously costly.. The prices she paid—and those paid by people she loves and who love her—were and are egregious. Depicting them honestly, she admits her losses, without regret.

Abortion protesters have been increasingly successful in corroding women’s rights. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of abortion providers has dropped 37 percent from 2,900 in 1982 to 1,819 in 2,000. The “graying of providers,” 60 percent are older than 50, is a serious problem. Even Dr. Wicklund, now 53, had to close her abortion clinic, the only one in Montana, to help care for her ailing parents.  Lonely and alone, fighting the abortion battle, takes its toll.  Wicklund sounds as though she, too, is suffering from burnout.

Worse yet, medical schools, like politicians, are simply not addressing these trends. “Most physicians are graduating with little more than circumstantial knowledge of abortion,” reports Medical Students For Choice (MSFC.org), an organization of 10,000 medical students. trying to “stand up in the face of opposition, work to destigmatize abortion provision among medical students and residents, and persuade medical schools and residency programs to include abortion as a part of the reproductive health services curriculum. “ MSFC aims at “training a new generation of pro-choice doctors in leadership, advocacy, and organizing skills.”

THIS COMMON SECRET should be required reading for medical students, residents, patients (aren’t we all),families, and politicians waving their election flags. That’s pretty much all of us.

THE SEARCH FOR THE FATHER: MY FATHER'S HEART by Steve McKee

         “A man,” said Freud in Mourning And Melancholia, “doesn’t become a man till his father dies.” But as Wall Street Journal reporter Steve McKee tell his father’s story—and his own--, he does not become a man until he wrote My Father’s Heart (Da Capo Press, Perseus Books, January, 2008) nearly 40 years after his father’s death.

          Steve McKee’s father “dropped dead,” as they call it, in 1969, when Steve was 16 and his father was only 50. Ironically, he and his father had just finished watching “The Immortal,” a television movie about a man whose blood gave him immunity to disease, including heart disease. After that, another medical show, “Marcus Welby, MD” was beginning.

         These medical televisionaries were no help to John McKee, Steve’s father. “A heart attack slammed him off the back of the couch while we were watching television.” As simply as that. Days before, a doctor’s checkup had “declared him fine.” Nothing new here. The family’s cardiac curse had killed all the McKees in their 40s or early 50s often after a doctor’s verdict had announced a clean bill of health.

          When Steve told his sister Kathy that he’d finished the book about their father, “Kathy let a short silence hang between us on the phone. ‘I hope,’ she finally said, ‘I hope that when you’re done with this that you’ll like Dad more and think better of him...And I hope you can forgive him for dying when he did, and the way he did.’”

          McKee quickly changes the subject. He reports that 80 million Americans have some form of cardiovascular disease, that 325,000 individuals “will die from what is termed ‘out-of-hospital’ or ‘emergency room’ sudden cardiac arrest.” 

          Repeatedly he joins statistics with the personal adding, “the classic heart attack of popular lore, just like Dad’s on September 30, 1969.” Again and again, McKee says, “It was just the two of us at home that night. He was fifty. I was sixteen,” a fact he cannot get over as he tries to figure out how and why his father had to die.

         In McKee’s search for the father, for finding out who his father was and by extension who he is, the son left behind,  he tries to learn why his father did so little to prevent his second heart attack  He portrays his father as a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, job-hating Type A, reminiscent of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It seems to the son that the father gave up the fight after his first heart attack. But why?

        Again and again, pegging statistics to the personal, McKee reminds himself  that every heart attack happens to a someone who is a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a checkout clerk, or someone at the gym…”The lives and then the deaths of every one of these people will affect millions, millions, millions of others…. I know. It happened to me. It is the story I’ve been writing all my life. The father leaves; the son remains.”

        Why does it take McKee almost four decades “to finish the story I have been writing all my life. Finally.”? He has to grow up --and older--before he can forgive his father for dying. He has to learn on his own flesh how little his obsessive self-discipline and exercising did to avert the evil decree. Until he recognizes his genetic complicity, until he sees that he never knew his father—and his father didn’t know him, he can’t forgive his father for dying—for leaving him to learn on his own.

         Once he is older than his father was when he died, he can come to grips, at least partially, with his father’s death.. Early on, his coach tells him, “Your father just died and you will never get over it…but you will get used to it.” Kind as the coach may have been, neither Steve McKee nor the rest of us who lost a father to a sudden heart attack, ever “get used to it.”  McKee says of his father’s witnessing his own father’s heart attack, “Maybe Dad never got used to it.”

          My Father’s Heart rambles. The writing sometimes lapses into unfortunate, everyday Buffalo-York vernacular. But when the story returns to McKee’s father, to his empty life, his early death, to what his death has taught Steve McKee, the writing tightens and reaches out poignantly across the page.

         In writing about his father’s heart after learning that he, the son, is also a prisoner of heart disease, McKee finally realizes that his father’s death gave him life and taught him how to live. “The night I watched Dad die, I watched me die, too. My life began the night his ended. Learn from me, he said. And so I did. I have become who I am because of him…And I am alive.”

         This book, “an attempt to share the memory of my father,” helped Steve McKee grow up. As My Father's Heart ends, Steve McKeee can run a five-kilometer race with his adopted son Patrick. Freed from the McKee curse, Patrick is a victim of juvenile diabetes. Patrick's diabetes taught Steve "we are who we are, whoever that is."

        As they race together, McKee rejoices, “Father and son, shoulder to shoulder.” My Father's Heart may be the talisman keeping Steve alive to race into the future with his son.