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Showing posts from May, 2014

Pretty is what we can fantasize about - imagining having known about my brca1 before cancer struck

I'm reading Jessica Queller's Pretty Is What Changes , chronicling how she discovered that she was brca1 positive and the medical decisions she made therewith.  The bad: tediously name-droppy.  The good: Queller really lets us in on what it feels like to consider cutting off a part of your body because it might save your life. And probably save you from a serious and grizzly illness. And whether or not that is too much of a decision for us all. I find it strangely comforting to read about someone who had a prophylactic double mastectomy in response to learning about her cancer gene. It isn't that I want to share the misery – I really really desperately don't – but that I can fantasize that avoiding cancer is possible. Dramatic, traumatic, but possible. This is a genetic disease. This means I was born with the code that would lead to this, sort of. So, it feels silly to me to think of changing who I was born to be, – “Oh, what if I didn't have this gene?”

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