The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer - Plot & Excerpts
—Samuel 22:43 Cancer therapy is like beating the dog with a stick to get rid of his fleas. —Anna Deavere Smith, Let Me Down Easy February was my cruelest month. The second month of 2004 arrived with a salvo of deaths and relapses, each marked with the astonishing, punctuated clarity of a gunshot in winter. Steve Harmon, thirty-six, had esophageal cancer growing at the inlet of his stomach. For six months, he had soldiered through chemotherapy as if caught in a mythical punishment cycle devised by the Greeks. He was debilitated by perhaps the severest forms of nausea that I had ever encountered in a patient, but he had to keep eating to avoid losing weight. As the tumor whittled him down week by week, he became fixated, absurdly, on the measurement of his weight down to a fraction of an ounce, as if gripped by the fear that he might vanish altogether by reaching zero. Meanwhile, a growing retinue of family members accompanied him to his clinic visits: three children who came with games and books and watched, unbearably, as their father shook with chills one morning; a brother who hovered suspiciously, then accusingly, as we shuffled and reshuffled medicines to keep Steve from throwing up; a wife who bravely shepherded the entire retinue through the whole affair as if it were a family trip gone horribly wrong.
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