Are you or a loved one suffering from Ovarian Cancer? Check out this inspiring memoir by Professor Susan Gubar.
After learning she had advanced ovarian cancer, Susan Gubar felt the need to reassure her two grown daughters that not even death could separate them. Although she lacks conventional faith in religion or the afterlife, Gubar says, "I found myself earnestly promising one and then the other of my distressed daughters, 'I will love you beyond my death. I will love you from another space that you will palpably feel, and feel me to be loving you.'"
Gubar's promise to love her daughters from beyond the grave, if not from heaven, was one of several ways that Gubar surprised herself after her 2008 diagnosis. The disease — which kills more than half of women in five years — forced her to weigh treatments that could extend her life, and even grant temporary remissions, but at the cost of tremendous suffering, says Gubar, 67, author of the new book Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer.
Although she uses her book to testify to the inadequacies and unintentional cruelties of modern cancer care, Gubar says she doesn't fault her physicians, "who have no options but to extend your life through options that hurt you." And Gubar says she's luckier than many other ovarian cancer patients, who don't have supportive friends and family.
But she's also frustrated that doctors have made so little progress against the disease, with survival rates only modestly higher today than in the 1970s. Ever the activist, Gubar writes, "Something must be done to rectify the miserable inadequacies of current medical responses to ovarian cancer." Yet she also hopes that medical advances will quickly make her critique sound outdated, that her book will become a "historical curiosity quite soon, as soon as possible, sooner than possible."
Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-05-20/Susan-Gruber-ovarian-cancer/55092236/1
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