Search Results for: cancer

Against the Odds

Longreads Pick

A group of young doctors from the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford School of Medicine are looking for new models to make health care better and more affordable:

“Patel was second up in the presentation, a little nervous and barely tall enough to be seen behind the podium. She stated the problem in her target area: Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, with costs estimated to be $173 billion by 2020. These rising costs are unsustainable.

“And what do many poor-prognosis cancer patients get for all the money spent? ‘Horrible treatment,’ she said, citing a statistic that silenced the room: Seventy-three percent of terminal cancer patients never have an end-of-life discussion with their oncologists. ‘Many patients are rushed off to chemotherapy without understanding the big picture. And when predictable treatment side effects happen at night and on weekends, patients who are unable to reach their oncologist end up in misery in emergency rooms and hospitals. Later in their illness, many die painfully in intensive-care facilities that bankrupt their families emotionally – and sometimes financially.’

“During her presentation, Patel’s eyes became dark pools that threatened to overflow. A few people in the audience wept silently, perhaps remembering loved ones who had similarly suffered.

“‘Overall, these added services improve the quality of life of patients, giving them what they need and want without delay,’ she added after describing her model. ‘And best of all, we lower health insurance costs … simply by doing the right thing.'”

Author: Kris Newby
Published: Oct 26, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,103 words)

The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills

Longreads Pick

Undying hope from a city’s football fans—and a fear that their team will soon disappear:

“For Bills partisans, white, black, or anything else, the greatest fear is not that the team will lose a game or suffer another demoralizing season. A far more distressing concern is that the team will follow industry and investment and generations of young Buffalonians before it and abandon the region for good. Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959, still owns the team. He’s 94. For a few of those years it seemed one of his daughters, the NFL’s first female scout, was being groomed to replace him, but she died of cancer in 2009, at the age of 61. Wilson has refused to announce a plan of succession or to comment further on the team’s future without him. Upon his death, his heirs appear ready to sell the Bills to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, fans exist in a suspended state of disbelief and existential terror. They are sure one moment that Mr. Wilson must have a backroom deal set up to keep the team in Buffalo, a city he’d stuck with for the past half-century, even if often at a distance from his mansion in Michigan. But the next instant they can’t figure why he’d then let them suffer. The old man had done all right for himself in Buffalo, paying just $25,000 for a team currently worth about $800 million, while Erie County has covered the costs of stadium renovations. Yet now he seems ready to allow Toronto, with its armada of newly built glass and steel towers, to pirate away their team. Since 2008, the Bills have been playing one ‘home’ game a season in Toronto, which for many in Buffalo feels like an unwanted trial separation. Maybe more threatening is Los Angeles, with its mega-market revenues and media, which is angling to lure not just one NFL franchise but two. When Bills management negotiated a lease extension on its current property, they signed up for only a year. Hardly the long-term commitment of a Bills fan’s dreams.”

Author: Ben Austen
Source: Grantland
Published: Nov 8, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,503 words)

This Land Is My Land

Longreads Pick

The story of a property-line feud between two families in North Georgia:

“The main bridge between the families was the fast friendship of Jewell Crane’s father and Lewis Dempsey’s father. The old men agreed that neighbors should talk and cooperate. Thus, when it came time in the early 1980s to fence off the southern part of Lot 784 to contain Dempsey’s cattle, all four men walked over the area as the posts were planted and the hog wire run.

“The first real friction between the two families had nothing to do with land. One day Dempsey spotted his father drinking a jar of whiskey. And since it was white mash in Lumpkin County, Dempsey didn’t have to ask where it had come from. Never much of a drinker himself, and worried that the alcohol would react with medication his father was taking for lung cancer, Dempsey threatened to turn Crane in if it ever happened again. Dempsey recalls that about two weeks later, he heard that Crane had gotten hassled by police for moonshining. Dempsey sought out his neighbor to assure Crane that he had not reported him (a denial Dempsey maintains to this day). But for weeks thereafter, when Dempsey met Crane on the road or drove past his house, the bootlegger refused to wave.”

Published: Nov 1, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,926 words)

When A Daughter Dies

Longreads Pick

A physician relates his experience of watching his daughter die of cancer:

“A Greek aphorism warns, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ A calamity that I hoped/presumed never would occur now seems likely – I am going to outlive one of my children. I am very unhappy, and my wife asks if we will ever be happy again.”

Source: Freakonomics
Published: Oct 16, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,140 words)

Andres’ Story

Longreads Pick

A man terminally ill with cancer and his friendship with a hospice worker:

“Andres was in his brother’s living room on the Northside last August as he told his story. A small group of family and friends was his audience. No one flinched as he covered the tougher parts – everyone there knew the story. When he finished, though, he turned toward an empty spot in the room and said something that made the room go silent.

“‘There’s just one thing I can’t understand,’ he said. ‘They can fix all these people. But they can’t fix me.’

“Kelly Racine broke the silence. She is a psychosocial specialist with Community Hospice who was on one of her weekly visits to see Andres. Hearing him talk about things that can’t be explained, she asked him what he had decided to do despite the incurable disease. His eyebrows lifted.

“‘Make people laugh,’ he said.

“‘And what is your word?’ she said.

“‘Survive,’ he said, and his mood brightened a little.”

Published: Sep 29, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,775 words)

The Birth of Bond

Longreads Pick

The complicated birth of the big-screen 007. After several false starts, author Ian Fleming handed his character to two relatively small-time film producers:

“It is 1959, and Sean Connery is putting in time in a cornball live-action Disney feature called Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He’s the second male lead, billed beneath not only Albert Sharpe, the elderly Irish character actor in the title role—a kindly farmhand who sees leprechauns—but also the green-eyed girl, the ingénue Janet Munro. Though verily pump-misting pheromonal musk into the air, to a degree unmatched before or since by any actor in a Disney family movie, Connery is still a jobbing scuffler, not a star. He has no idea of what lies in store for him.

“The seventh of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Goldfinger, has recently reached the shops. But there are no Bond pictures yet. In London, a Long Island–born film producer named Albert R. Broccoli, known as Cubby, is still lamenting that he blew his chance with Fleming. The previous year, Broccoli had set up a meeting with the En­glish author and his representatives to talk about securing movie rights to the Bond series, only to miss the meeting to tend to his wife, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In Broccoli’s absence, his business partner, Irving Allen, let Fleming know that he didn’t share his colleague’s ardor. ‘In my opinion,’ Allen told Bond’s creator, ‘these books are not even good enough for television.'”

Author: David Kamp
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 19, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,863 words)

A son attempts to get an unpublished manuscript of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle for his dying mother, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader:

Mom is completely nonplussed. I am a little hurt, but then I realize I haven’t seen Mom once the past several weeks with her hands on a paperback or her Kindle.

I decide that if things come through with the Paolini book—and I spend a lot of time thinking about this, more time than I probably should, because it’s an easy and hopeful thing to think about—I will read it to her myself. Out loud, while she lies in bed too weak to hold the pages up in her hands. When my grandfather was dying of pancreatic cancer, my aunt rubbed lotion into the cracked skin on his feet. She guided a straw from a glass of ice water to his lips. I imagine my reading to Mom will be just like performing these tasks, only different.

“An Epilogue to the Unread.” — Chad Simpson, The Rumpus

See more from The Rumpus

An Epilogue to the Unread

Longreads Pick

A son attempts to get an unpublished manuscript of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle for his dying mother, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader:

“Mom is completely nonplussed. I am a little hurt, but then I realize I haven’t seen Mom once the past several weeks with her hands on a paperback or her Kindle.

“I decide that if things come through with the Paolini book—and I spend a lot of time thinking about this, more time than I probably should, because it’s an easy and hopeful thing to think about—I will read it to her myself. Out loud, while she lies in bed too weak to hold the pages up in her hands. When my grandfather was dying of pancreatic cancer, my aunt rubbed lotion into the cracked skin on his feet. She guided a straw from a glass of ice water to his lips. I imagine my reading to Mom will be just like performing these tasks, only different.”

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Aug 20, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,690 words)

An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer:

GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you’re in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you did in your 20s?

Mr. RAKOFF: Yes, I think I am. I think – well, first of all, the cancer that I had in my 20s was, I even referred to it as the dilettante cancer. You know, it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, eminently curable and just a whole different ballgame from what I’ve got now.

And I was a little less interested in knowing about the cancer back then in my 20s. I was sort of like, well, do whatever you need to do. I’m just going to sit here and lie back and think of England.

“David Rakoff’s ‘Half Empty’ Worldview Is Full Of Wit.” — Terry Gross and David Rakoff, 2010, Fresh Air

David Rakoff’s ‘Half Empty’ Worldview Is Full Of Wit

Longreads Pick

An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer:

“GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you’re in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you did in your 20s?

“Mr. RAKOFF: Yes, I think I am. I think – well, first of all, the cancer that I had in my 20s was, I even referred to it as the dilettante cancer. You know, it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, eminently curable and just a whole different ballgame from what I’ve got now.

“And I was a little less interested in knowing about the cancer back then in my 20s. I was sort of like, well, do whatever you need to do. I’m just going to sit here and lie back and think of England.”

Source: NPR
Published: Sep 21, 2010
Length: 28 minutes (7,017 words)