The Assertive Cancer Patient

Seattle Blogger Reviews ‘Cancer Movies’

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 25, 2007

For further information:
Jeanne Sather
Jeanne.sather@gmail.com

Seattle Blogger Reviews ‘Cancer Movies’
Writer Living With Cancer Says She Is Often ‘Blindsided’ at the Movie Theater

SEATTLE—Jan. 25, 2007—Local blogger and cancer patient Jeanne Sather has added a new feature to her blog, reviews of popular films about cancer.

“How many times have I gone to a movie, maybe with one of my sons, looking for a little comedic relief from my life with cancer, only to find out that the movie is ABOUT CANCER!” Sather says in a recent post on www.assertivepatient.com.

“Do I walk out? Suffer through it? Do I send my kid out for popcorn when the main character starts throwing up?
“I’m tired of being emotionally blindsided at the movie theater. That’s why I decided to start reviewing ‘cancer movies.’”

Sather, who is living with metastatic breast cancer, to date has reviewed “Pieces of April,” “Calendar Girls” and “Wit.” Future reviews will include the Japanese classic “Ikiru” (To Live), “Love Story,” “One True Thing” and more.

Some excerpts:

Pieces of April: Seventeen minutes into this “comedy” about April’s attempts to make Thanksgiving dinner for her estranged family, Joy (April’s mother, played by Patricia Clarkson) throws up for the first time, in a grungy public restroom. At that point, I wondered if we should walk out.

Ignore April (Katie Holmes). But if you’re in the mood for some black cancer humor—and to see someone else throw up for a change—choose this film to see Clarkson in action, showing off photos of her chest pre- and post-mastectomy, rescuing her damp wig from the toilet after yet another bout over the bowl, and leading the family in a graveside service for road-kill that she insists they stop and bury.

Calendar Girls: Don’t watch it for what it says or doesn’t say about cancer, watch it for the fun of seeing 11 women “of a certain age"—the members of the Rylstone Women’s Institute of North Yorkshire—toy with the idea of taking their clothes off to be photographed for a nude calendar. And watch the extra features for interviews with the real women whose story is told in the film.

Wit: This film, which stars Emma Thompson as a friendless scholar with advanced ovarian cancer who undergoes experimental therapy in a clinical trial, should be required viewing for all oncologists, cancer researchers, oncology nurses and others who work with cancer patients. If you are undergoing cancer treatment, you may want to give it a miss. Guaranteed to leave you with rug burns on your soul.

As a journalist and an outspoken advocate for the cancer patient's point of view, Sather began blogging in September 2006. She has written about how to avoid medical mistakes, Breast Cancer Barbie, MIA doctors, who disappear when their patients are dying, and much more.

Sather began her career as a journalist, working for newspapers, magazines and wire services, including Newsweek in Tokyo, Reuters in Seattle, MSN (also in Seattle) and a number of other publications.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 at age 43, she started writing about cancer for the Web site OnHealth.com, which later fired her while in cancer treatment. That story made national headlines.
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Pieces of April, 2003

For months after I first saw “Pieces of April” I was angry: I wanted to write to the producer and say, “We don’t throw up any more. Women with breast cancer don’t throw up during treatment any more.”

That one thing about the movie made me so angry, and even now I can’t say why except that I had never thrown up during my breast cancer treatment to that point.

In 2003 when I saw the film, I was five years into my life with cancer, and not quite to the two-year anniversary of my cancer going postal (i.e., metastatic) on me.

I was, as I recall, in clinical remission on a regimen that included the miracle drug Herceptin, and I think I was in major denial about the fact that my cancer could not be cured.

That’s the only reason I can think of that I got so angry about the throwing-up thing. Because Patricia Clarkson’s portrayal of a woman who has to stop to vomit at every rest stop along the way from the suburbs into Manhattan is the funniest, and truest, thing about the movie.

Joy (Clarkson) snipes back at her family as they hover over her cooing, “How aaaare you?” every time she so much as breathes, or, at one point, appears not to be. She’s the kind of cancer patient I appreciate: unsentimental, pissed off at the world, and funny.

Just a Saturday Afternoon at the Movies
“Pieces of April,” is, in fact, responsible for this entire Cancer Movies section of my blog.

I went to see it in the fall of 2003 with my then-13-year-old younger son (He was 8 when I was first diagnosed, so a pretty big chunk of his real life had been just one long cancer movie). We’d seen the preview (not even a hint about cancer) and thought it would be a fun movie to see.

So there we sat, all unsuspecting, popcorn and sodas in hand, blindsided at about minute eight in the film when it became clear that the mom, Joy, had cancer.

Seventeen minutes into the movie, Joy throws up for the first time, in a grungy public restroom. At that point, I wondered if we should walk out. (We consulted in whispers over the popcorn.)

A few minutes later, Joy’s wig falls into the toilet while she is throwing up at yet another rest stop, and that was the turning point: My son and I decided to sit back and enjoy the cancer humor.

Sick, yes. Black, yes. But so true to (my) life. Except for all the vomiting, of course.

And Clarkson does a wicked, bitchy, terminally ill woman. (Note: several reviews say her character was terminally ill. You can’t tell that from the film; she just looks like a woman undergoing chemo—bald, thin, bitchy.)

Choose “Pieces of April” to see Clarkson in action, showing off photos of her chest pre- and post-mastectomy, slashing at her overly solicitous family, and leading the family in a graveside service for road-kill that she insists they stop and bury. Ignore Katie Holmes, who played April before she was Katie Holmes, AKA wife of Tom Cruise, mother of Suri, staple of tabloid covers. Holmes is cute, but somewhat miscast as the bad daughter of this dysfunctional family.

Warning: If you don’t come from a perfect, loving, supportive family (and who does?), this movie may punch some buttons with its themes of togetherness and resolution over a holiday meal, even though that part of the story is pretty hokey.

But hokey can still make you cry, especially if you haven’t spoken to your mother in years. Just a warning.

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Buy Pieces of April

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Cancer Movies, an Incomplete List

After the Wedding
Brian's Song
The Bucket List
Calendar Girls
Dark Victory
Girls' Night
Ikiru
Life as a House
Love Story
One True Thing
Out of Time
Pieces of April
Stepmom
Terms of Endearment
The Doctor
The Family Stone
Wit

Send me your suggestions for additions to this list: jeanne.sather@gmail.com

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A Reply From Amazon, Sort Of

You gotta love those canned replies. Today, I received this e-mail from Codi F. at Amazon (scroll down for my translation):

"Greetings from Amazon.com Associates.

"I am sorry to hear you are experiencing difficulty with your Omakase
Link. I have viewed your link on your web site, however it does not
appear you entered any specific categories when you created your
link.

"Please note, when building an Omakase Link you have the option to
narrow down the products displayed by clicking Advanced Settings
above the HTML coding. This feature allows you to select categories,
keywords and also eliminate certain keywords from your link.

"I would recommend rebuilding your link using the Advanced Settings
features and see if the items displayed are closer to what you would
like to see on your web site.

"As always, please feel free to contact us should you have future
questions or comments, and thanks for your continued interest in the
Associates Program.

"Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

"If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=wwbhdeay3431665616
"If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=wwbhdeay3431665616&q=has0&nc2c=1

"Best regards,

"Codi F"

I will be clicking on one of the links above to tell Codi that he/she did not answer my question, which was, Why is Amazon only supplying ads for movies to my blog?

Here's my translation of Codi's reply: "I don't know why this is happening. But maybe you would like to try setting specific categories for your ads, and maybe that will satisfy you."

This is, sadly, about par with the answers I get from almost every Web company that I deal with. And I know why--they are trying to handle customer service problems with as few real bodies as possible.

How do I know this? I once worked, briefly, for a company that provided so-called "customer service" via the Web for companies like Amazon, and it was all about the bottom line: How to offer customer service without using real people, or by using as few real people as possible.

And if you do have to use real people, don't use Americans. Use people who will work for cheap in countries like India.

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

More Cancerous Fruit

A Google search for “tumor grapefruit” turns up 214,000 matches.

These include:

“Grapefruit-sized tumor removed from giraffe's head in a historic operation…”

“The tumor was a round, grapefruit-sized, well-circumscribed mass weighing 1500 g and measuring 18 cm in its greatest diameter …”

“A man who had a grapefruit-size pituitary tumor removed 10 years ago has a full life and a newly adopted baby boy…”

“…they commonly grow gradually to the size of an orange or grapefruit.”

Granted, some of these hits refer to the anti-tumor properties of consuming grapefruit, but changing the search terms to “tumor grapefruit-sized” still turns up almost a thousand matches, including:

“An 11-year-old California boy who nicknamed his brain tumor 'Frank' has been doing fine since a surgeon removed the grapefruit-sized tumor last year …”

And then there are the peas. A search for “pea-sized tumor” turns up about 25,900 matches.

I’m still trying to find a psychiatrist who can explain oncologists’ fixation with fruit.

OK, it's not a cancer comparison, and it's not a comparison to fruit, but this headline certainly caught my eye:

Baby as small as pen when born to go home

The problem is, I keep envisioning a baby the size and SHAPE of a pen. How weird is that? And forever after, this little girl will be known as "the pen baby."

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Advertising, Ethics, and Blogging, Part I

This is pretty funny. (Or maybe I’ve been spending too much time blogging and it's not funny at all …)

I’ve been wanting to put some ads on my blog, but I don't want ads that I consider unethical.

Google ads are out (see below for some samples). And the ads provided by Typepad, which hosts my blog, weren’t any better. I tried these briefly and not only did I not like the ads that were popping up on my site, but the Typepad click counter was not working properly, which meant I wasn’t getting paid for all the people who clicked through to an ad from my blog. (OK, so I made something like 86 cents one week, but it was the principle of the thing: I should have made at least $2.)

So I decided to go with Amazon, and signed up for its Associates program, which gives me two options: to put ads for specific products, or links to ads for specific products, where I want them (See Calendar Girls for an example of this); or to use the “omakase” option.

“Omakase” is a Japanese word that, in this context, means “leave it up to us.”

Well, that sounds easy enough. Amazon promises that it will scan the content of each page and will place an appropriate ad on that page. “Omakase links will show an Associate's visitors what they're most likely to buy based on Amazon's unique understanding of the site, the user, and the page itself,” Amazon says.

OK. Simple, right? Useful to my readers, and maybe profitable to me.

As a trial, I put the html to make the omakase ads appear on most of the pages in my Medical Mistakes section, which gets a lot of traffic.

This is the funny part, finally: After you read Cancer: Guarding Against Medical Mistakes, you see ads for two movies, "A Month By the Lake," starring Vanessa Redgrave, and "Pride & Prejudice," with Keira Knightly.

After you read Chemotherapy Errors, Amazon's careful analysis of the content of that page has determined you are in the mood to buy "As Time Goes By-Reunion" or "Mrs. Henderson Presents."

Uh huh.

Read Prescription Drug Errors, and Amazon is betting you will be in the mood to buy "Billy Elliot" or "The Camomile Lawn," which begins with a funeral!

Pretty much all chick-flicks, so Amazon’s guess that most of my readers are female is correct, other than that, I give Amazon's omakase a D-.

I’m waiting for an e-mail from Amazon in reply to my question about why it is placing only movie ads on my site (I was expecting books). I’m expecting a canned answer, but we’ll see. I think there are a few real people left working at Amazon.

(Note: by the time you read this, the ads on the pages I’ve mentioned will probably have changed. They rotate on some schedule known only to Amazon.)

What's Wrong With Google?
Search for “cancer cure” on Google and the sponsored links (ads) that appear in the right column include the following: “94% of Doctors Don't Know that you can Beat Stage IV Cancer w/out Chemo, Surgery, or Radiation” (this one is the old, “doctors don’t want to cure your cancer” line); "11 Ways To Kill Cancer"; "Cancer Treatments Your Dr Doesnt (sic) Even Know About!"; "Low Level Radiation From Stones Fight Cancer."

As far as I am concerned, most if not ALL of these advertisers are quacks, and Google should not sell ad space to them. In Australia, the government prosecutes people like these who prey on the fears of sick and dying people.

I’ve fought this battle with Google before, see If It Quacks Like a … Quack and Running With Fear, but so far I haven't reached anyone high enough in the company who can do anything more than spout drivel about "commercial speech." I guess I'll stop by Google headquarters next time I'm in the Bay Area.

What next? Well, if Amazon can’t send appropriate ads to my blog, I can always switch over to Barnes & Noble, which has a virtually identical program (and I like the stores, especially the cushy armchairs), or use Netflix ads (a company I really love—no late fees! I’ve saved a LOT of money on movie rentals already this year, and it’s only January. AND they have a great selection of Japanese movies).

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Cancerous Fruit

Who taught oncologists to compare tumors to fruit? They all seem to do it.

The blogger who writes As the Tumor Turns described herself as having a "grapefruit-sized tumor" between her lungs. She didn't come up with that fruity description on her own, some doctor described it that way to her.

A woman I interviewed several years ago, an ovarian cancer survivor, was told she had a "grapefruit-sized tumor" in her abdomen.

Doctors seem partial to grapefruit.

Thank god my cancer wasn't large enough to compare to fruit, at least initially. And now that it's in my bones it also doesn't lend itself to fruity comparisons.

If your doctor ever compared your cancer to a fruit, please e-mail me your story. I think I'm on to something here.

In the meantime, I will contact a couple of oncologists I know who have a sense of humor (yes, they do exist) and ask them about the fruit thing.

Since I first wrote this, a couple of women have e-mailed me to tell me that doctors compared their breast cancer tumors to peas, so apparently doctors are fond of produce metaphors beyond fruit.

Dr. Tony Back, a medical oncologist at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, says, "For tumors that grow in round spheres, the grapefruit metaphor is common. I do hear about golf-ball size tumors and tennis ball size tumors too."

Dr. Robert Livingston sent me a tongue-in-cheek reply: "I never thought about this, Jeanne. Actually, I don’t do it. Perhaps it has to do with how sweet (or hungry) the oncologist is." Dr. Livingston, who has a national reputation as a top breast cancer oncologist, is at the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson and is one of my doctors.

Dr. Back adds an explanation: "I think there are two roots to this behavior. First, i recall from medical school that pathologists have a tendency to describe various disease processes using descriptive language often used for food, i.e. 'strawberry gallbladder.' Apparently pathologists think this is a metaphorical use of language that helps them remember things.

"I think it's a little unseemly," he continues. "I think you need a psychiatrist to really delve into the deeper meaning though."

Any psychiatrists out there want to weigh in?

Read more about Dr. Tony Back: Discovering the Power of Goodbye

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

The First Annual Advanced Assertive Cancer Patient Award

I went to my favorite blog, As the Tumor Turns, today, intending to write a little bit about it and provide some links to my favorite posts, and Liz had posted the most incredible news.

The blog is written by Liz, a woman in her 50s, who is in debt, has no income, no health insurance, and, until recently, had a grapefruit-sized (an aside: who taught oncologists to compare tumors to fruit? They all do it.) tumor between her lungs: a high-grade, highly aggressive, stage IV lymphoma. And she manages to laugh about it. And make me laugh with her—sometimes while crying at the same time.

I’ll let her tell you about it. The post is called “The Scream,” and she writes about preparing for a confrontation with her oncologist: “I was all set to earn my wings as an Advanced Assertive Cancer Patient. I was going to pin the dude to the fucking wall.”

But things didn’t go quite as planned.

Read The Scream.

Once you’ve read it, you’ll see why I’m busy designing Liz’s award as an Advanced Assertive Cancer Patient. Should I design her a medal to wear around her neck? Or a beauty-queen style banner? Maybe I’ll knit her her Advanced Assertive Cancer Patient wings (I’ve been knitting late at night when I can’t sleep).

You might also want to read A Day at the Clinic, which describes a typical scenario at Our Lady of the Damned, the hospital where Liz has been receiving treatment for an aggressive lymphoma.

The girl can write!

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Calendar Girls

I ordered this one from Netflix because it stars Helen Mirren, one of my all-time favorite actresses. I wasn’t aware that it was about a man dying of cancer until I was already watching it.

Don’t watch it for what it says or doesn’t say about cancer, although the presentation of John’s cancer treatment and death didn’t punch any of my hot buttons—they were portrayed gently and accurately, without a lot of bathos.

Watch it for the fun of seeing 11 "women of a certain age" toy with the idea of taking their clothes off to be photographed for a nude calendar. And watch the extra features for interviews with the real women whose story is told in the film.

If you’re a Helen Mirren fan, though, give this one a miss and go see The Queen (2006) instead. A much more interesting, Helen-like performance.

A footnote: I just discovered Canada's Calendar Girl. Here's the link to her blog: Calendar Girl Blog

Buy Calendar Girls


@ Jeanne Sather 2007. All rights reserved.

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Five Things You Don’t Know About Me

I've been tagged by my friend Jeff to write five things you don't know about me.

I guess it is hip to be asked, so I decided to play along, even though it felt a bit like the blog version of one of those chain letters—“Send this letter to five people and all your dreams will come true. Break the chain and you will bring disaster on the world”—you know the kind.

However, having written about myself so extensively for the past eight years, my life is already pretty much an open book (pardon the cliché), and I found it difficult to come up with five things no one knows about me.

But it was fun to try. Here’s the list:

1. I can’t sing.

2. A man I once dated is now the mayor of Hiroshima.

3. I am seriously claustrophobic. I can’t sleep in tents, go down in caves, or have MRIs.

4. I still have the Chatty Cathy doll I received as a birthday present as a child. Sadly, she no longer speaks; her voice box emits only garbled nonsense.

5. My oldest friend is a woman I met in the second grade at Emerson Elementary in Hoquiam, Washington. Lis now lives in Astoria, Oregon, and we e-mail each other almost every day.