Part memoir, part indictment, Relentless is one woman's honest and
unflinching account of suffering from terminal cancer. In December
2006, Stephanie Greco Larson, a forty-six year old political
science professor at Dickinson College, was diagnosed with
inoperable cancer. Oncologists told her that the disease would kill
her in mere months. In the four years following her diagnosis,
Larson endured being pricked, prodded, cut, injected, ignored, and
scolded by doctors who tried to stave off her incurable cancer.
Drafted between her diagnosis and death in 2011, Relentless
provides one patient's perspective of living and dying with
peritoneal cancer in the American medical system, a system she
found ill-equipped to hear, treat, and comfort those with
aggressive and eventually fatal forms of cancer. From health
insurance to hospice care, Larson catalogs the shortcomings of the
American healthcare system and its failure to serve those who
cannot be cured. Larson deconstructs our society's notion that the
ideal cancer patient should be the positive fighter who keeps the
messy parts of the disease to herself: I'm more comfortable with
the term "cancer victim," but that term is passe. It has been
stripped from the discourse by those seeking agency, and
ironically, by those who want to empower us. If I call myself a
cancer victim, people get unhappy. They don't want to think of me
as a victim. I don't fit the cowering, helpless stereotype they
have in their heads. So they correct me: "You're no victim";
"You're still here, aren't you"; or the generic "Don't say that.
You have to stay positive." So if I'm not a victim or a survivor,
and I'm not really living with cancer or necessarily in treatment,
what am I? I'd say that I am a "cancer sufferer." I am a cancer
sufferer. I have cancer. I suffer from it. I am not always
fighting. I am not always in treatment. I am not yet dead from
cancer, but I will be in months or years, and until then, my life
is fundamentally altered by the presence of cancer and the medical
protocols for treating it. I am a cancer sufferer. Like fools, I
don't suffer it gladly. Edited and published posthumously,
Relentless is Larson's refusal to stay silent about the
uncomfortable realities of her treatment and terminal illness.
Under the steady hands of Meg Allen, her former student, and David
Srokose, her devoted husband, this, her final rallying cry, boldly
challenges readers to cease substituting catch phrases like "stay
positive" and "think pink" for actual compassion. All profits from
this memoir go toward the Stephanie Greco Larson Scholarship at
Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
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