"J" wrote :
> Uncle Sally wrote: ... excerpt of original post by Uncle Sally
snipped for brevity ...
"Hello Uncle Sally,
I don't know that we want to get into "medical horro#rs" here (I munged it
in case some loonies are searching newsgroups).
However, what was the take home message from your interviews? Better
education by the GP or schools? Or TV or ??
I don't think I grew up with any preconceived notions about it, but then we
rarely discussed it or other medical issues unless one of us had a
condition. So medical horrors weren't a topic. We were too busy surviving
and having fun. Work, play and all that good stuff..
"
Dear J,
First, it is poor usenet social etiquette to reply using a changed topic
heading.
Second, if this not a place where "we" are deeply into "medical horrors,"
then I don't know what it is. Every day I am at the cancer clinic I see
people from children to older persons whose conditions are so much more
serious than mine. And I ask myself, many times, why I am the lucky one with
the financial resources to afford
Taxotere and CISPlatin that most of the
Thai people at the hospital cannot afford (this is a public hospital :
wealthy Thais go elsewhere). For me to "hide from horror" is a form of
denial, and weakens my creative self.
Okay, I admit I just "lied"
There are times when I am as scared shitless
as anyone else about this little rebel group of cells in my lower tongue.
The question "what was the take-home ?" message I find interesting. For
three months my life was filled with the realities of these families, their
struggles, their failures, their betrayals, their transcendence over
suffering, their enduring bonds, their shattered bonds, the ways in which
they reached out to help other people even in times when they were deeply in
pain. I felt a continual sense of humility in their presence.
I tried to approach, consistent with the "ethnomethodological field work
model" of Dr. Garfinckel of UCLA (sady now best remembered as Carlos
Castenada's [the master fraud who japed all of anthropology and most of
popular culture and academia with his "Don Juan" fictions] thesis
supervisor) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Garfinkel http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/CUR...thno/intro.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology
each family as "ding an sich," a universe unto itself with its own customs,
laws, mores. I tried to abandon my preconceptions, and be a "well" into
which they could "pour" their stories, and, where I could, where they
allowed me to, to encourage the telling of the stories.
Of course I "failed" : no one can really abandon their preconceptions. Some
families were very suspiciious of me at first, in part because some of the
local chapters of the California ACS thought the study itself, imposed "top
down" by the state level organization was a waste of time and money. An
interesting introduction for me into the internal politics of ACS at the
state level. Some families used their "interviews" to really have a deep
exchange and re-appraise their own "histories" of the multiple cancers and
the events surrounding them. A few of the more isolated individuals who
seemed deeply depressed to me used the "interview" to do some work on
themselves, perhaps assisted by the finite one-time nature of the interview.
What I call the "kind ear you know is going away so you can tell them
anything" syndrome.
Most fascinating to me were the social changes that happened to some of the
families (as in for example one hippy familiy with twins who both had
cancer) where the mother (father and mother living officially "unwed") got
control of a large amount of financial resources, completely changing the
family dynamics where she was (before cancer in the children) essentially
"mother, cook, and squaw" to her "mystic chief." The money had to be put in
her name for the children, and while she was busy taking them to UCSF for
treatment, her mate was busy taking pejote and praying to the four winds for
guidance and healing. They had a major crisis in their marriage because the
mother, and soon the kids, really believed that mainstream medicine was the
way to go (and the kids got to eat hamburgers and see movies which Pa
disapproved totally).
If there was any broad "take-home" message it was, I think, how the social
construction of "Cancer" in American culture was dysfunctional for many
people. The reactions of family, friends, employers, authority figures,
etc., sometimes strange and hurtful. I hate to bring this up (fearing I may
make you squirm), but, for my money, if you really want to understand the
"social construction of Cancer" in western culture from an existentialist
viewpoint, then I think de Beauvoir's book is the best. She's been there,
walked the walk, and used her vast knowledge and education and her
compassionate heart to help others of us understand better the context of
"cancer."
For this little social science graduate student the experience of doing
these interviews was eye-opening. Led me to view "Cancer" as a vast spectrum
of disorders "lumped" into a socially useful construct at the expense of
realizing how different someone 60 years old with Hodgkins is from someone
thirteen years old with a brain tumor. I hope the collected interviews did
provide some raw materials for ACS California that they did ultimately use.
I fear it may have been "swept under the table" because of the political
acrimony some of the powerful regional branches felt about the study.
best, Uncle Sally (most unashamedly : a "loonie searching newsgroups"
"Those are my principles; if you don't like them, I've got others." Groucho
Marx
Marisa Marchetto NY Times OP-ART visual/critique on Cancer Research 03/31/07 (link enclosed) 
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