Jane Austen’s final illness is discussed with intensity and much speculation. When I was visiting her cottage in Chawton, England, there was a display comparing her illness to the disease John Kennedy suffered. Obviously, back then there no tests and no treatment, but the color of her skin and other indications in her final days as mentioned in family documents have lead some to this conclusion. However, this is not the only hypothesis about what led to her early death. For example, cancer has been suggested by more than one Austen scholar.
Which leads me back to dreaming about sausage. Actually, I dreamt of Sausage is a book by Corinna Borden that I received through a giveaway on librarything.com. In return I am supposed to write a review on Amazon. It’s a cool thing, really.
I dreamt of Sausage is Ms. Borden’s story about her travails and travels (including to Mexico) with cancer. I received the book right after discovering the field of health psychology, which is based on the idea that mental and physical health affect each other (the technical term: the biopsychosocial model). So I was excited to find the book in my mailbox. It helps that it was free, of course. But it also was exactly the sort of topic an aspiring health psychologist should be reading about: a personal experience with a chronic, possibly terminal illness.
However, I unfortunately have to admit that I found it heavy going at times. Ms. Borden switches between her journal entries and real life. This is sometimes a bit unwieldy, but it’s bearable. It’s the italics she includes in the reality based segments that started to wear on my nerves. These are her thoughts as she goes through the process of dealing with doctors, hospitals, her husband, family, etc.
For example, my thoughts as I was reading: Cut her a break, she is going through a lot of pain. She’s scared and has cancer.
I thought that same thing over and over, because those italics started to sound really whiny. And then I would feel bad that I felt this woman dealing with this incurable illness was whiny. So I would put the book down. Then I would pick it back up eventually, and by the end I was glad that I had read it.
Ms. Borden points out, rightly, the impersonal, sterile, and often unwelcoming environment of the Western medical system. She, however, seems to blame her husband for a lot of things without taking into account that he has worked for many years to become a doctor in that same system. I agree with her that residency is brutal and no one should have to work under those situations. But being a doctor is something that most people start wanting very early in life. So her husband is caught between a very sick wife and a career that to him is most likely not just a job and for which he has worked many years. She doesn’t even pause to italicize anything about his point of view until almost all the way through the book, when she finally thinks to ask him how he felt about everything.
She also points out the inability of each side- Western and alternative medicine- to work with the other. I was a bit surprised at this, but then toward the end of the book, her Western doctor states that after a certain point he is okay with her trying other methods since after that point Western methods are also not proven. Some of the alternative doctors, however, refuse to work at all with those also trying Western methods. I was also discouraged by some of these doctors’ (and hers, through their influence) attitudes toward clinical trials. One of the tenets of scientific study is that these trials/experiments are able to be replicated. In other words, any random group of people would have very similar results. Her insistence that those trials were only applicable to the people who took part in them was rather naïve. We all want to think that we are very different from everybody else, and to some extent we are. But there are many more similarities.
All in all, a decent thought provoking read.
Personally, I would rather dream of chocolate.
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