Topic of Cancer | Culture | Vanity Fair
Topic of Cancer
One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.PLEASE Read More http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009?printable=true#ixzz0vkj3cQGI
Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer in June, and he opens up about the ordeal in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. "I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse," he writes. "The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. ... Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services." Hitchens was describing the events leading up to his hospitalization, in which he learned of his diagnosis. "In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist. ... I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me," he writes. "Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?" Hitchens goes on to describe his decision to undergo chemotherapy (or "chemo-poison," as he describes it), which has resulted in weight loss, hair loss ("which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico") and the lack of facial stubble. Many Hitchens fans have discussed praying for him, a famous nonbeliever. Yet, in Hitchens's final paragraph, he lauds the "astonishing number of prayer groups" and promises to write on that topic at a later date. http://dyn.politico.com/click/printstory.cfm?uuid=8538d575-44bd-44c7-a25f-5540cbe7e609 |
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