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Hope for Head and Neck Cancer Patients, Survivors, Caregivers
Dear All,
I want to share with you Kathleen Watt’s just published memoir, REARRANGED: An Opera Singer's Facial Cancer and Life Transposed. I hope this book gives you a sense of hope.
Key themes throughout the narrative include how a patient can and should be included in treatment decisions. And that a harrowing medical journey is not a hiatus from life, but a segment of the path through life itself which, met with creativity, courage and resilience, can result in a fully engaged future of wellness and plenty.
In the twenty-five years since Kathleen Watt’s battle with osteogenic sarcoma (in her jaw), Narrative Medicine has matured to a fully accredited instrument of the physician’s craft, allowing the power and specificity in a patient’s own story to inform and fortify her own treatment. Across the profession, doctors, nurses, practitioners, and caregivers are now implementing narrative best practices and team-based health care. In the spirit of contributing to a crucial knowledge base, Kathleen offers her own narrative in her debut memoir, REARRANGED: An Opera Singer's Facial Cancer and Life Transposed.
In lyrical prose, with musical allusions, clinical references, and a bit of comic relief, Rearranged follows Kathleen Watt's plunge from the operatic stage into the netherworld of hospital life—its indigenous creatures, its peculiar language, its signposts of the mysterious human condition—through the devastation of cancer, and out the other side. Kathleen was a New York opera singer at mid-career, with a steady, lucrative chorus job at the Metropolitan Opera and solo gigs elsewhere, anticipating her best year ever. Instead, a vicious bone cancer blew her plans to smithereens, along with her face. She had to let everything go. Bit by bit, through a brutal alchemy of lethal toxins, titanium screws, and infinite kindness, she discovered new arrangements for old pieces, in a life catastrophically transposed. Not only a heart-wrenching medical odyssey, but an ultimately joyous personal journey of transformation.
Warmly,
Joy London*
*As Kathleen’s partner at that time, I was the primary caregiver during her 10-year medical odyssey. Since we’ve remained good friends, I’m now helping to get the word out about her incredible story of bone cancer and the ten-year battle to reconstruct her face.
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Hello Joy,
This forum is set up for patients to help patients, caregivers, doctors, etc and vise versa. Although we often pass on information, tips, materials, and such to help everyone, we are not a book store. If you have something specific you wish to discuss about your journey, please don’t hesitate. If you have a question, please ask.
Whether someone is a school teacher, road builder, factory worker, farmer, politician, disabled, or opera singer, these lives all have a story to share and information about care that is relevant.
I know you meant well and wish to support a friend. However, I think you will find these pages full of stories of journeys, books and in some situations novels.
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2 ReactionsJoy, I appreciate this suggestion for reading as I enjoy inspirational stories about medical journeys. I have recommended my favorite inspirational and helpful books to others on this forum over the years. My favorite choice was written by a Mayo palliative care physician Dr. Ed Creagan. If Kathleen's book provides hope or inspiration to even one patient who is struggling, then it has succeeded in helping others. I look forward to reading it. Thanks for sharing.
Dear Sue,
I'm thrilled with your reception to my post. It was not meant as a shameless plug; it was and is meant to educate and bring hope of survivorship to all those who have carried the physical and emotional burden of head and neck cancer. There are just a few memoirs describing head and neck cancer survivorship. And this book is different from the rest. Why? Here is how one person with medical issues described it:
"For such brutal subject matter, Kathleen has subverted the well-worn tropes of the medical memoir, instead writing a story that trills with candour and authenticity. The writing in and of itself is lyrically evocative, affecting and profoundly moving, while the story is one of true grit, and a flawless example of what it means to be a survivor. At its core, Rearranged is a story of hope and is a worthy and much needed addition to the canon of medical memoir. Rearranged is set to become a seminal memoir on not just what it is to have cancer and survive, but what it means to be human. Carly-Jay Metcalfe | Author of the memoir Breath, coming March 2024 from University of Queensland Press
I looked at Dr. Edward Creagan's list of publications. I was particularly drawn to his article, 'Attitude and disposition: Do they make a difference in cancer survival?' This is one of the key themes in Kathleen's book. The psychosocial aspects of cancer treatment cannot be underestimated. Thank you for bringing Cregan's work to my attention.
I wish you (and your caregivers) all the very best in life and good health.