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What Cancer Taught Me
Cancer and Society
Book What Cancer Taught Me At just 18 years of age, Jake Bailey was diagnosed with stage IV Burkitt’s lymphoma, presenting in his kidneys, bone marrow, spinal fluid, cheek, jaw, eye sockets, nasal passage, and the membrane around his brain. Unsurprisingly, his health rapidly deteriorated, and he was admitted to hospital before he could finish his academic year. Happily, he recovered, and remains in remission. What Cancer Taught Me is his story. It isn’t often that autobiographies are written by teenagers. As Bailey himself points out at the start of the book, “I’m not qualified to give out any kind of life advice—I’m a 19-year-old kid.” Yet it is precisely this youth which forms the core strength of the book. Despite his horrific experience with cancer, Bailey’s narrative voice maintains a charming level of innocence. His positive outlook on life and refusal to be beaten down by his diagnosis
immediately endear him to the reader, and will push you to discover just how he coped with a health crisis most people couldn’t imagine going through. Although such a strong presence throughout, this narrative voice is at times a weakness. Bailey often leans toward cliché and repetition. Transitions between and within chapters are sometimes jumpy, darting from one idea to another with very little segue. Figures within Bailey’s experience are tantalisingly mentioned, and then glossed over, when a little more depth would unequivocally have added to the book. The tunnel-like vision of oneself as the centre of the world is a natural thing for an adolescent. It lends itself to autobiography, and makes the reader trust Bailey’s voice implicitly— at no point are we made to feel he is pretending to have knowledge he doesn’t possess.
Touchingly, Bailey includes several of the many emails his mother wrote to him while he was in hospital. These glimpses of a viewpoint outside of Bailey’s own help to frame his experiences within a wider perspective, and create a picture of Bailey that is slightly separate from the version he presents. In revealing character traits such as a tendency to downplay pain and discomfort, his mother’s emails add weight to Bailey’s own writing: if he says a hospital treatment was unpleasant, you had better believe it. What Cancer Taught Me is a profoundly hopeful book that reveals Bailey’s strength of will and character on every page. He writes with a voice you can imagine in the room with you—gentle, funny, and so matter of fact about his experiences that it is easy to forget just how difficult it must have been.
Jake Bailey: What Cancer Taught Me Penguin Random House, 2017 pp 239 ISBN 978-0-14-377086-2
Victoria Denny
App The Purple Drug Guide Being a parent in today’s world of excessive options and opinions on how to raise a kid can be over whelming. Imagine how exponentially that experience worsens if your child is diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly, the choices you are making have substantially bigger stakes and more immediate consequences. Many decisions will not be up to you. Instead, doctors will prescribe treatment regimens with medications that most parents do not have the expertise to understand. Enter the Purple Drug Guide—a saving grace for today’s families facing paediatric cancer. The Purple Drug Guide is a free app that houses a comprehensive, easily searchable database of all the
medications currently used to treat paediatric cancer. You can search for a specific drug by name, or search by cancer type. For example, a simple search for “leukaemia” brings up a list of several drugs, indicating those that are US Food and Drug Administration approved and those that are experimental (the Purple Drug Guide is produced in the USA). For each drug, there is extensive information: who produces the drug, what it does, alternate brands and names, pricing, and a list of food and drug interactions. The app also allows users to save searches and create a reading list. The Purple Drug Guide was created by The Purple Society (TPS), founded
www.thelancet.com/oncology Vol 18 November 2017
by the Conti Family of Arizona, USA, after their daughter, Nitalia, died of brain cancer in 2011. Since her passing, they have devoted their time to helping create better outcomes for other families. TPS is a volunteerrun, non-profit organisation with a mission to increase the number of children who survive cancer. To that end, they both run programmes to support families and fund research to advance clinical trials that can bring new treatments to the market. Reading through several drug entries, I found the app intuitive and easy to use. Here and there a few pieces of information were not available. It’s easy to imagine parents pulling out the app to quickly search
For more on The Purple Society see http://werpurple.org/
1441
Book What Cancer Taught Me At just 18 years of age, Jake Bailey was diagnosed with stage IV Burkitt’s lymphoma, presenting in his kidneys, bone marrow, spinal fluid, cheek, jaw, eye sockets, nasal passage, and the membrane around his brain. Unsurprisingly, his health rapidly deteriorated, and he was admitted to hospital before he could finish his academic year. Happily, he recovered, and remains in remission. What Cancer Taught Me is his story. It isn’t often that autobiographies are written by teenagers. As Bailey himself points out at the start of the book, “I’m not qualified to give out any kind of life advice—I’m a 19-year-old kid.” Yet it is precisely this youth which forms the core strength of the book. Despite his horrific experience with cancer, Bailey’s narrative voice maintains a charming level of innocence. His positive outlook on life and refusal to be beaten down by his diagnosis
immediately endear him to the reader, and will push you to discover just how he coped with a health crisis most people couldn’t imagine going through. Although such a strong presence throughout, this narrative voice is at times a weakness. Bailey often leans toward cliché and repetition. Transitions between and within chapters are sometimes jumpy, darting from one idea to another with very little segue. Figures within Bailey’s experience are tantalisingly mentioned, and then glossed over, when a little more depth would unequivocally have added to the book. The tunnel-like vision of oneself as the centre of the world is a natural thing for an adolescent. It lends itself to autobiography, and makes the reader trust Bailey’s voice implicitly— at no point are we made to feel he is pretending to have knowledge he doesn’t possess.
Touchingly, Bailey includes several of the many emails his mother wrote to him while he was in hospital. These glimpses of a viewpoint outside of Bailey’s own help to frame his experiences within a wider perspective, and create a picture of Bailey that is slightly separate from the version he presents. In revealing character traits such as a tendency to downplay pain and discomfort, his mother’s emails add weight to Bailey’s own writing: if he says a hospital treatment was unpleasant, you had better believe it. What Cancer Taught Me is a profoundly hopeful book that reveals Bailey’s strength of will and character on every page. He writes with a voice you can imagine in the room with you—gentle, funny, and so matter of fact about his experiences that it is easy to forget just how difficult it must have been.
Jake Bailey: What Cancer Taught Me Penguin Random House, 2017 pp 239 ISBN 978-0-14-377086-2
Victoria Denny
App The Purple Drug Guide Being a parent in today’s world of excessive options and opinions on how to raise a kid can be over whelming. Imagine how exponentially that experience worsens if your child is diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly, the choices you are making have substantially bigger stakes and more immediate consequences. Many decisions will not be up to you. Instead, doctors will prescribe treatment regimens with medications that most parents do not have the expertise to understand. Enter the Purple Drug Guide—a saving grace for today’s families facing paediatric cancer. The Purple Drug Guide is a free app that houses a comprehensive, easily searchable database of all the
medications currently used to treat paediatric cancer. You can search for a specific drug by name, or search by cancer type. For example, a simple search for “leukaemia” brings up a list of several drugs, indicating those that are US Food and Drug Administration approved and those that are experimental (the Purple Drug Guide is produced in the USA). For each drug, there is extensive information: who produces the drug, what it does, alternate brands and names, pricing, and a list of food and drug interactions. The app also allows users to save searches and create a reading list. The Purple Drug Guide was created by The Purple Society (TPS), founded
www.thelancet.com/oncology Vol 18 November 2017
by the Conti Family of Arizona, USA, after their daughter, Nitalia, died of brain cancer in 2011. Since her passing, they have devoted their time to helping create better outcomes for other families. TPS is a volunteerrun, non-profit organisation with a mission to increase the number of children who survive cancer. To that end, they both run programmes to support families and fund research to advance clinical trials that can bring new treatments to the market. Reading through several drug entries, I found the app intuitive and easy to use. Here and there a few pieces of information were not available. It’s easy to imagine parents pulling out the app to quickly search
For more on The Purple Society see http://werpurple.org/
1441