Cancer affects those it encounters more than just physically. There are emotional impacts, psychological impacts, and lifelong influences resulting from the disease.
Author John Walker Pattison, born in 1957, admits to having a rather uneventful childhood. While fun, happy, and full of life, nothing so newsworthy about his childhood would prompt a memoir. Until 1975, at the age of eighteen when he begins experiencing bouts of fatigue. So notable in fact that after climbing down into the cofferdams of a boat he is meant to be welding, he is found sleeping after missing lunch. Time and time again his family doctor writes it off as something less life threatening, until he is admitted to the hospital with suspected appendicitis. Tests, x-ray, pokes, and a series of investigations follows. Resulting in our author being given no type of explanation, at least as far as he’s aware. Learning later that his parents, in what they thought was an attempt to protect him, hid the truth of his cancer diagnosis. What follows is the toll this diagnosis took on him, his unrelenting love for Hawkwind and the unexpected support the Lakota Sioux Nation provided to him during his stage IV Hodgkin Lymphoma battle.
As a reader this memoir had a unique contribution to the field of cancer survivors. Surviving stage IV lymphoma through the various treatments and long-term effects is an impressive and statistically unlikely event given his response to the treatment and options. However, it’s the forty-seven-year survival, career pivot working thirty-two years as a nurse in cancer services, and his daughter also battling cancer at a young age that truly set this read apart from the rest. The brutal honesty about his thoughts, psychological well-being, and treatment effects, open readers’ eyes to the gut-wrenching diagnosis of cancer and the guilt and responsibility that are placed on patient’s shoulders. But the ongoing life he lives, dedication to the field of nursing in the same hospitals that treated him, and the comfort he found in Hawkwind and the Lakota Sioux Nation all these years later makes this a memorable read even after the last page is turned.
For The Love Of The Page 