Midterm Critical Response
Regarding, Barbara Ehrenreich’s excerpt from a smile or die: the brighter side of breast cancer” (2010) the author expresses how the fight with cancer wasn’t easy and how she felt threatened to stay positive. Society shouldn’t have a judgment on how a cancer patient feels.
Throughout, the excerpt Ehrenreich reveals “how they (the doctors) attempted to recruit me into positive thinking” (Ehrenreich, 2010, p140). She explains how her negative perspective wasn’t appropriate for breast cancer. They say the effects of a positive viewpoint will help with the cancer treatment. She complained to people about the effects of the chemotherapy and the money grubbing insurance companies. Ehrenreich, being forced to be positive, I can relate to this. I was forced at a time in taking anger management classes as a way they’d “control my anger”. Apparently I wasn’t friendly enough toward society. In turn spent two months with an anger management class, discussing my feelings and how to be more positive. Sadly I don’t believe it worked.
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“Waking up on a gurney with a surgeon over you” (Ehrenreich, 2010, p141) confirming that breast cancer is now your new hobby isn’t too amusing. With nothing to do and no one to discuss her unhappiness without being infuriated, she was alone. I know the feeling of being alone. As a child, my mom worked all the time obviously my father was never there. I had to be my own friend. Even me and my younger brother were distant I have no one to talk to without a huge blow out either, so I can understand her frustration in that type of predicament. In these cases, people have different realities of how being sick works. Ehrenreich announces “Breast cancer did not make me prettier, or stronger, more feminine or spiritual…it gave me a gift.”(Ehrenreich, 2010, p143) her experience gave her knowledge on how to be more
In Ron Koertge’s “First Grade”, the author employs indirect characterization and foreshadows the affects of education by describing the speaker’s initial thoughts and beliefs and by writing in the past tense to show how education can limit students’ minds and rob them of their vitality.
Although illness narratives are not novel or new, their prevalence in modern popular literature could be attributed to how these stories can be relatable, empowering, and thought-provoking. Susan Grubar is the writer for the blog “Living with Cancer”, in The New York Times, that communicates her experience with ovarian cancer (2012). In our LIBS 7001 class, Shirley Chuck, Navdeep Dha, Brynn Tomie, and I (2016) discussed various narrative elements of her more recent blog post, “Living with Cancer: A Farewell to Legs” (2016). Although the elements of narration and description (Gracias, 2016) were easily identified by all group members, the most interesting topics revolved around symbolism as well as the overall impression or mood of the post.
By reading Delights and Shadows we get see another method of poems writing that is filled with imagery that comes in poetry format but a more like short story. In this poem “At the Cancer Clinic” like so many others, Ted Kooser wrote in point of view of some that were watching this happening. The poem talks to how weak to walk on her own beside her she has two people accompany her to the examination room on each side to This poem tries to capture the feeling of wonder that people often get when they realize that someone who is engaging against unconceivable physical weakness is fraught to persevere with the little strength they have. The Cancer Clinic invites readers to reflect on the strength of the woman and not to dwell on the illness that has emaciated her but her willingness to live and a more uplifting experience than and the title first tells The book Kooser shares these stories know that he is not just the only one that goes through this thing like breath of a loved one that was sick.
Being diagnosed with a chronic illness is a life-altering event. During this time, life is not only difficult for the patient, but also for their loved ones. Families must learn to cope together and to work out the best options for the patient and the rest of the family. Although it may not be fair at times, things may need to be centered on or around the patient no matter what the circumstance. (Abbott, 2003) Sacrifices may have to be made during difficult times. Many factors are involved when dealing with chronic illnesses. Coping with chronic illnesses alter many different emotions for the patients and the loved ones. Many changes occur that are very different and difficult to get used to. (Abbott, 2003) It is not easy for someone to sympathize with you when they haven’t been in the situation themselves. No matter how many books they read or people they talk to, they cannot come close to understanding.
She argues that a positive outlook will not make one cancer free, give one a job, make one wealthy or do you constantly happy. The beginning of the book made me realize that the balance of positive and negative thinking is the most important life lesson. She shows the readers how staying positive through her battles of cancers is going to make it easier, but Ehrenreich is trying to explain to the readers that it is okay to be negative. Ehrenreich gives the readers more of a negative side and thinks being positive is beginning to harm us. I can understand why she was thinking so negative while she was battling cancer, she was told by a cancer patient, “I know that if I get sad, or scared or upset, I am making my tumor grow faster and it will have shortened my life” (Ehrenreich 43). Ehrenreich sure did give the audience a way of understanding as to how people rely too much on positivity. She tells us that one will need to
This shows that positive thinking can get in the way of all your hopes and dreams. You may have an image of a life that seems perfect, but you need to be able to separate that from reality and not get the two mixed. It sometimes blinds you from the true reality. Also in the same text, it stated ‘’the pressure of positive thinking can result in suppressing any pessimistic thoughts or unpleasant emotions because they might attract bad things. You deprive yourself of access to the complete picture and the full range of emotions.
At the beginning, I was very skeptical of Ehrenreich and her set up of the study. She makes it very clear at the beginning of the book that she was not doing this for emotional reasons. She explains that, “My aim here was much more straightforward and objective—just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day (Ehrenreich, 2001, p. 6). This struck me as not only a bit on the heartless side, but a complete and utter flaw in her research methods. As a Ph.D in Bilogy, Ehrenreich is of course used to the objective side of research, but should have known from the start that the real world is not an objective laboratory. The people that she spent all of those months with working and interacting with were not simply robots that only went to work and sleep. They had emotions and dreams and aspirations other than simply to make enough money to pay next month’s rent. When starting the study, Ehrenreich did not take any of this into account. She simply set up a point blank experiment, to attempt to live how the other half lives, but she soon found out that this is not as simply as paying rent for a
For example, to make people aware that breast cancer can affect even young women, thefaceofbreastcancer.com printed a poster portraying the faces of fifty different women all under the age of 41 who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. The words “Your sister,” “You,” “Your friend,” are highlighted sporadically throughout the poster. The phrase “Have a lump or pain? Regardless of age, CHECK IT OUT NOW!” is also highlighted in the midst of all the women’s ...
My views about Ehrenreich’s novel that it was filled with educational details of minimum wage job occurrences. The author captures concrete memories of her experiences of several job positions. Working in several jobs of hard manual labor is exhausting for the mind and body. The job experiments involving all these jobs to see what many struggling people endure on a daily basis. I thought the experiments resulted in average, and intolerable work environments. Working one or two jobs was needed to survive and pay for necessities. From my perspective, it was a useful trial to show readers the hardships people of every culture deal with constantly.
In paragraph 15 of her book Bright-Sided, author Barbara Ehrenreich uses the term “debilitating“to describe the effects of chemotherapy. In my opinion, this choice of word is appropriate in discussing the state in which breast cancer patients often find themselves while undergoing cancer treatments.
Almost all of us have heard of a scenario such as this one: A woman battling cancer has lost almost all hope of recovery. She has not been able to turn to her family for support for fear of their reactions to her illness. One morning she finally breaks down and tells her husband about the cancer. Instead of being devastated and turning his back on his wife, the husband supports the wife, every step of the way, and she gradually seems to improve.
The “School of Shock” was a riveting exposé written by journalist Jennifer Gonnerman in 2007, it outlined the horrendous abuse of youth in America’s mental health system. After extensively examining the infamous Rotenberg Center that used electrical pain to try to change the behavior of troubled youth, Jennifer Gonnerman wrote a fiery article detailing her examinations in the magazine entitled Mother Jones.
She is begging to a “trusted and convalescing friend,” to tell the depressed girl the “brutally honest opinion of her as a person.” (Wallace 66) She is paralyzed in fear of what the friend might say about her, what her true opinion of the girl actually is. In this moment, the girl comes to a startling revelation about herself; she feels nothing for anyone but herself. She’s crying to her friend about her own personal problems, ignorant that her “best friend” is suffering from a “virulent malignancy in her adrenal medulla” and is vomiting in the toilet. (Wallace 68) The depressed person is finally aware of her blatant narcissism to a degree, that the despair and sadness she was feeling for her therapist’s death was only for herself. Yet, the narcissism that the depressed person has restricts her from seeing past herself and her needs and to care about others. The depressed person is unable to care about her friend with neuroblastoma, she only cares about the pain and fear that she herself is in. She is stuck in her narcissism and is unable to get
“Just take my hand, together we can do it, I’m gonna love you through it.” (I’m Gonna Love You Through It- Martina McBride). Breast cancer is an awful disease that will change your life in a single moment. ”Everything in my life was turned upside-down. I really had a wonderful life; A husband, three children. And breast cancer came along and just smashed my world” (Janelle’s Journey). Breast cancer is an aggressive war that takes a great amount of fighting to survive. “You go from being perfectly healthy, to feeling like, ‘okay, I’m dying’. It started a whirlwind of things that I never anticipated having to go through.” (Bonnie’s Story- Beyond The Shock). Did you know that the youngest person ever to have been diagnosed with breast cancer
...e the cancer and look for the positives in the prognosis and treatment find encouragement for the future. There are various models and theories such as health belief model that are used to explain ones belief on risks and associated risks of a chronic illness and then there are theories such as Crisis theory when dealing with shock when diagnosed with a chronic illness and gate control theory when looking at pain and the psychological issues around dealing with pain. However even with various theories and models trying to explain crisis, pain and compliance to treatment the outcome and understanding and ultimately the way an individual deals with a chronic illness such a breast cancer falls very much down to self-efficacy and the belief the individual holds towards the illness itself the attitude and perception in the outcome of the illness, treatment and beyond.