John Diamond, who has a column in the London Times on Saturdays, has made an attempt, he says, to "write the book I was looking for the night I got the bad news". When he was given his diagnosis of throat cancer, he had no idea where to turn, no source that would tell him quickly what he needed to know - which was: "how would cancer affect me - what was it like to be a person with cancer, to deal with the pain and the fear and the anger?"
Despite his agonising descent into the medieval-style tortures of his cancer treatments - leading to the surgical removal of his tongue and to a voice which only his nearest and dearest could understand and finally to the admission that there was nothing more the doctors could do to cure him - he remains true to his faith in orthodox medicine and is fairly scornful of the claims made by supporters of alternative approaches.
He has some shrewd insights, for instance, into the motivations of those who urge him to think positively about his cancer:
"I'd come to the conclusion that whenever somebody told me how much good a positive attitude would do me, what they meant was how much easier a positive attitude would make it for them. Positivism meant we could all carry on as before, that they didn't have to think before they spoke and then get embarrassed about saying things that I hadn't even noticed bore some metaphorical relationship to what I was going through (not long before a woman had reddened and apologised almost on her knees for using the word cancer in the sentence 'I think he was Leo but he may have been Cancer'). As long as I was positive it meant they didn't have to cope with the nasty thoughts."
It is clear however that he does practise an alternative therapy of his own, one that has probably helped him almost as much as the support of a devoted wife and loving family and friends: his is the therapy of writing, of transforming anguish into art. His therapy may help us, the readers, too - for as he points out, at least a third of us will succumb to cancer in due course.
";
echo $mb_link;
echo "
";
if ( session_is_registered('navigation')) {
echo " Return to Message Board's last display of selected messages";
}
?>