The Red Devil : To Hell with Cancer and Back - Softcover

Katherine Russell Rich

3.98

120 ratings by Goodreads

9780413770103: The Red Devil : To Hell with Cancer and Back

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413770109 ISBN 13: 9780413770103

Publisher: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2002

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The Red Devil is a bold, wickedly funny tale of illness, joy, and the improbable triumph of love in the midst of despair.

When Katherine Russell Rich was thirty-two, a newly divorced, high-powered magazine editor living a glamorous life in New York City, her ten-year (and still counting) ordeal with cancer began. Soon she was bald, scrambled, and living in two worlds simultaneously: the world of the ill, filled with treatments, exhaustion, and doctors as focused on avoiding malpractice suits as on healing; and the "normal" world, where dating, career, vacations, and 401(k) plans still matter.

Alternately wise and wise-cracking, Rich serves up vignettes from the surreal world only the ill know: the MS patient who crashes her support group, the alternative practitioner whose gifts come from extraterrestrials, the doctor who fires her patient, dating while bald, working without a brain, and smoking with cancer. Here is a woman who has been brought to her knees by disease several times, only to get up and learn to dance, with grace, even.

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Review:

Nothing's off limits in Katherine Russell Rich's gutsy account of her breast cancer treatment, from harsh insights about her relationships ("I was a stiff-lipped, bloodless, manners-obsessed WASP. He was Ricky Ricardo in a bad mood") to the wrenching details of her disease's progression to stage 4 status. For example, the tumors break through bone and into her spine, making her bones crack from within: "After months of straining against its leash, the fury of pain broke free and ripped into me as I bent down, slashing through my back, tearing into flesh, pressing without mercy onto bone.... I struggled to make myself stand, and felt--heard--something rip in my back." She holds back nothing--the pain of her tests, the apathy of many of her health providers, the intimate details of relationships, and the necessary wit ("Cancer humor is like the Zen laugh; it's a way of gathering back forces, a means of breathing in absurdity, darkness, and pain and blowing them out in one great joyous guffaw."). You follow her journey from being meek and fearful to the kind of "kick-ass cancer patient" she comes to respect. This is a riveting book that will change your understanding of what it's like to be treated for--and live with--cancer. --Joan Price

From the Back Cover:

A book of dizzying horror . . . narrated by a woman of sharp perceptions and no more delusions.
-- The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant, harrowing, beautifully written, beautifully lived. This book has both charm and importance, and how often does one see those two qualities in
combination?"
-- Lorrie Moore

"The Red Devil bucks tradition and falls squarely on the side of 'funny,' 'intelligent,' and 'wickedly sharp.'"
-- Wall Street Journal

"Defiant, spirited, and often devilishly funny, The Red Devil is at once brutally honest yet hopeful -- one joyous triumph."
-- Louisville Courier Journal

"Admirable, evocative, laced with shimmering pearls of hard-earned wisdom and stunning wit, he Red Devil is a chronicle of illness that transcends itself to become a testament to the bounty and bravery of the human spirit."
-- Elle

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