In Enduring Cancer Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city's largest cancer care NGO and at India's premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support.

A 2012 New York Times Book Review Notable Book "Staggering, searing…Ms. Gubar deserves the highest admiration for her bravery and honesty." —New York Times Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer. Ovarian cancer remains an incurable disease for most of those diagnosed, even those lucky enough to find caring and skilled physicians. Memoir of a Debulked Woman is both a polemic against the ineffectual and injurious medical responses to which thousands of women are subjected and a meditation on the gifts of companionship, art, and literature that sustain people in need.

Dr. Keith Block is at the global vanguard of innovative cancer care. As medical director of the Block Center for Integrative Cancer Treatment in Evanston, Illinois, he has treated thousands of patients who have lived long, full lives beyond their original prognoses. Now he has distilled almost thirty years of experience into the first book that gives patients a systematic, research-based plan for developing the physical and emotional vitality they need to meet the demands of treatment and recovery. Based on a profound understanding of how body and mind can work together to defeat disease, this groundbreaking book offers: • Innovative approaches to conventional treatments, such as “chronotherapy”–chemotherapy timed to patients’ unique circadian rhythms for enhanced effectiveness and reduced toxicity • Dietary choices that make the biochemical environment hostile to cancer growth and recurrence, and strengthen the immune system’s ability to attack remaining cancer cells • Precise supplement protocols to tame treatment side effects, relieve disease-related symptoms, and modify processes like inflammation and glycemia that can fuel cancer if left untreated • A new paradigm for exercise and stress reduction that restores your strength, reduces anxiety and depression, and supports the body’s own ability to heal • A complete program for remission maintenance–a proactive plan to make sure the cancer never returns Also included are “quick-start” maps to help you find the information you need right now and many case histories that will support and inspire you. Encouraging, compassionate, and authoritative, Life over Cancer is the guide patients everywhere have been waiting for.

An important addition to the literature of cancer by an award-winning scholar and memoirist. Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs. To stimulate the writing process, she proposes specific exercises, prompts, and models. In discussions of the diary of Fanny Burney, the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, numerous memoirs, novels, paintings, photographs, and blogs, Gubar shows how readers can learn from art that deepens our comprehension of what it means to live or die with the disease. From a writer whose own memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “moving and instructive…and incredibly brave,” this volume opens a path to healing.

Navigating the tumultuous waters of cancer treatment and decision making is difficult for all patients. It is also difficult for doctors and other medical personnel. This books deals with a variety of emotion-related and ethics issues that form much of the basis of the world of cancer related medicine: the responsibilities of the physician relative to truth, full disclosure, patient autonomy, death and dying, physician assisted suicide, and suicide in general among cancer patients. These and many other matters are discussed using real stories from the author’s extensive personal career in working with cancer patients and their families. This is not a book on treating cancer, but instead is a work that seeks to stimulate a dialog about these issues as well as the spiritual aspects of hope and other factors relating to the plight of cancer patients and their families. Written for health care professionals and cancer victims and their families alike, the core of the book centers around questions of medical ethics, doctor-patient relationships, decision making during cancer treatment (from medical and patient points of view). Given the emotional commitment and energy level required to work with cancer patients in a moral and ethical manner, medical students and residents will ask themselves: do I really want to be a cancer physician? Can I handle the ups and downs of treating people who may (or may not) be destined to fight and lose the battle against this strong nemesis? How will I answer the tough questions regarding medical approaches to cancer? How will I respond to patients who indicate a desire to commit suicide or request my help in doing so? What can I tell families whose loved one is choosing treatments that will not help and will deteriorate his quality of life? Basing his responses on the Oath of Hippocrates, the author illustrates how adaptable this oath actually is when considering the secular society in which we function. The Cancer Experience instructs doctors, medical students, and health care workers involved in cancer care on the proper role of medicine, the role of the doctor, and the opportunities for connecting with patients as they help them make decisions regarding treatment and end of life issues. It helps patients understand the issues facing doctors as they assist them, care for them, and try to maintain both close personal relationships but enough emotional and professional distance in order to protect themselves from the stress and strain when medicine fails and patients must face the hardest choices. Here the author promotes a return to traditional medical values that promote closer doctor-patient relationships in an effort to promote trust, civility, and partnership.

This book provides a contemporary and comprehensive examination of cancer in everyday life, drawing on qualitative research with people living with cancer, their family members and health professionals. It explores the evolving and enduring affects of cancer for individuals, families and communities, with attention to the changing dynamics of survivorship, including social relations around waiting, uncertainty, hope, wilfulness, obligation, responsibility and healing. Challenging simplistic deployments of survivorship and drawing on contemporary and classical social theory, it critically examines survivorship through innovative qualitative methodologies including interviews, focus groups, participant produced photos and solicited diaries. In assembling this panoramic view of cancer in the twenty-first century, it also enlivens core debates in sociology, including questions around individual agency, subjectivity, temporality, normativity, resistance, affect and embodiment. A thoughtful account of cancer embedded in the undulations of the everyday, narrated by its subjects and those who informally and formally care for them, Survivorship: A Sociology of Cancer in Everyday Life outlines new ways of thinking about survivorship for sociologists, health and medical researchers and those working in cancer care settings.