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

Rich, Katherine Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609603213 ISBN 13: 9780609603215

Publisher: Crown, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Russell Rich lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap

l is a bold, wickedly funny tale of illness, joy, and the improbable triumph of love in the midst of despair.  <br><br>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.<br><br>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 disea

Reviews

Diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32, Rich, currently a senior editor at Allure magazine, recounts how, over the past 11 years, she has survived a lumpectomy, radiation, several protocols of chemotherapy and hormones, a bone marrow transplant and alternative healing techniques. Her sharp eye for detail and caustic sense of humor (she refers to her ex-husband as Ricky Ricardo in a bad mood) serve her well in this gripping account. Navigating the medical universe of a cancer patient by the seat of her pants, Rich became dissatisfied with several medical professionals before she finally found a physician who had her best interests at heart: her first breast surgeon (male) had been prepared to operate without doing a mammogram until her mother intervened; another oncologist (female) did not return her phone calls and consistently undermined her until Rich finally got the message that she was no longer interested in treating her. Rich also explores the difficulties that having advanced cancer caused in her personal life: she was fired from one job, and a serious romance that had brought her a great deal of happiness ended. Three years after her bone marrow transplant and one week after her mother died, her cancer recurred. Although Rich suspects that her cancer is somehow connected to emotional loss, she evinces a terrific determination to go on living. She is now involved in a combination of alternative treatments and chemotherapy that her oncologist is convinced will stabilize, if not cure, her disease. Anyone who reads this feisty memoir will cheer her on. Agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, Ellen Levine Literary Agency. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Sharp and funny memoirs of a bright, tough woman fighting cancer and winning. In August 1988, Rich, then a 32-year-old magazine editor, discovered a lump in her breast. She didnt know it then, but as she puts it now, she was ``entering Cancerland.'' Her journey is a rough one and, at least here, has no end. She has a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. But by the time shes 37, the cancer has metastasized to her spine, and theres a terrifying episode in which she is temporarily paralyzed. Radiation treatment is followed by hormone therapy, but two years later, the cancer is back again and preparations begin for a bone marrow transplant. Three years after that, the cancer recurs in her adrenals, and hormone treatments begin again. Those are the bare facts, but Richs account is much more than a medical log. While in Cancerland, she falls in and out of love, joins and leaves support groups, changes jobs and doctors, meets ``cancer queens,'' who demand sympathy, and ``kick-ass cancer patients,'' who fight back. She tells what its like to be isolated from ones co-workers and also what its like to have a totally supportive boss. Loneliness, friendship, and man-woman relationships are explored, as is getting used to an altered body. There are the usual medical mishaps and doctor horror stories, but Rich is no whiner. She is a wry and perceptive observer of human behavior and a crisp and spirited narrator of her own experience as a cancer survivor. The titles ``red devil,'' incidentally, is Adriamycin, an intravenous drug she encounters in her first chemotherapy session and likens to Drano, for its so corrosive that if spilled on the skin it can cause third-degree burns. Read it and weep, and laugh aloud too. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rich's account of her bout with breast cancer is a roller coaster of emotions: fear, panic, depression, hysteria, elation. It is funny, painful, touching, and finally triumphant. From the time she discovers a lump in her breast (shortly after her divorce), through a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, and a harrowing bone-marrow transplant, Rich searches for peace in a life initially devastated by cancer. She copes with the stress of a faltering writing career, cold and indifferent doctors, frightened friends and colleagues, and misconceptions about cancer. She mocks the image of the "noble" cancer sufferer and humorously observes the prevalence of "break-up cancer," women succumbing after ending stressful relationships. Rich's account is also profoundly informative on cancer diagnosis and treatment. When the medical establishment fails to address cancer beyond the statistics, Rich tries meditation, vegetarianism, and alternative medicines. She also discovers the odd blessing the cancer becomes as it forces her to rebuild her life. Vanessa Bush

In 1988, 32-year-old Rich first discovered a lump in her breast. It was certainly not the dark ages of medical technology and awareness, but it might as well have been. Ignoring the lump herself (she was going through the breakup of her marriage and waiting to find a job so that she could have health insurance), Rich was then ignored by her doctor until she insisted on a biopsy. Rich, senior editor at Allure magazine, employs a keen journalistic eye, lyric writing style, and savage sense of humor to describe her next ten years in "Cancerland." She was certain her illness was caused by the divorce, and as other relationships came and went, she continued to feel this way with each new bout of the disease, eventually surviving paralyzing tumors in her spine, a long-awaited bone marrow transplant, and recurrence and additional therapy. Her story is harrowing from the get-go, with doctors and friends adding insensitivity and insincerity to the ordeal. She spares no detail of her cancer and offers an immense amount of useful traditional and alternative medical information among the caustic harangue. Her own growth from submissive to angry and outspoken will buoy readers; here is one woman who lives just to "kick cancer in the ass." Highly recommended.ABette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One

When we stand
on the low rungs
of the ladder of sorrow,
we cry.
When we come
to the middle
we're silent.
But when we climb
to the top
of the ladder
of sorrow,
we convert sadness into song.
-- ancient Hebrew poem

Critical Mass
I found the lump twenty minutes before breakfast, three weeks after my marriage broke up. I was taking a shower, soaping myself down, when my fingers slid into it and stopped. They pushed on a little, flew off, returned to confirm that, yes, there was something hard and alien in my left breast. After a pause, they resumed their investigation. But now my brain had seized up, and so the information my fingers were attempting to relay remained stalled, unprocessed, in touch. Perhaps that's why I retain such a strong sense memory of what they found: a mass the size of a pigeon's egg, a blob that felt like oatmeal packed in casing. I was puzzled--the thing hadn't, I swear, been there the day before--but not perplexed. I knew instantly what it was.
        
At work I phoned a friend. "Michelle," I whispered. "On top of everything, I found a lump in my breast. I can't do it: I can't go on!" Those were the days when I still liked hyperbole, before an excess of real drama killed my taste for the manufactured kind.
        
My friend soothed and reassured me; she presented the facts: All women find lumps; I was only thirty-two; the odds were this was absolutely nothing. The case she constructed was sure and ordered. "Yeah, you're right," I agreed, allowing myself to be seduced into calm, willing, temporarily, to forget my certainty, illogical as it was.
        
My evidence, had I spoken it, was this: My life was spinning to hell; my marriage had busted up at the end of August; I'd promptly moved eleven cartons of possessions into a sublet where I wasn't supposed to smoke but I did; and now, in September, I was about to take a new job. Of course that lump was cancer. What else was it going to be?
        
And those were my surefire arguments. If I wasn't going to bring them up, I certainly wasn't going to mention that, six months before, in a journal, I'd written, "I can't stay in this marriage any longer. If I do, I'll get cancer." Or how, not long after, I'd experienced some weird psychic breast cancer flash. "Diego, I'm not kidding, I'm getting the strongest feeling that somebody in one of our families has it," I'd told my husband. "To be safe, why don't you call your mother down in Buenos Aires and tell her to get a mammogram." Spooked, she rushed to get the test, which came back normal.

Nor did I mention another recent occurrence, but only, I would have told you then, because it had slipped my mind. Fear, I realize now, was blocking the memory of how, a few months earlier, in bed, my husband had frozen while caressing me. "I don't want to scare you," he said softly, "but I think I found a lump here." When he tried to locate it again, it wasn't there. I chalked the incident up to projectile hypochondria.
        
Diego and I were absolute opposites about a lot things, and illness was one of them. "Ah! I think I have a cancer!" he would announce, lying prostrate on the bed. "What a baby," I'd say, not at all amused or compassionate. My father was a Christian Scientist, and while my mother insisted on raising my brother, sister, and me Episcopalian, his beliefs suffused the house. We weren't expected to deny disease as he was, but we were strongly encouraged to rise above it. "It's just mortal error," my father would counsel me when I was laid low by some ailment. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, but I did know that mortal error was the reason why, in tenth grade, for instance, shimmery with a fever from bronchitis, I was still expected to haul myself to school. Coming into the adult world, I assumed everyone was like this. Diego, for one, was not.
        
"I have a headache! I cannot move," he declared from the floor of the Denver airport on Christmas Eve, where he'd flung himself just as the extended family was about to transfer to a flight to Breckenridge for a ski vacation. Pedestrians stepped over him. My parents stared down, flabbergasted. They'd never seen behavior like this. I had, a couple of times.
        
"Just ignore him," I advised my mother.
        
"But Kathy," she said. "He really looks sick."
        
"He is," I sneered. "Sick in his head."
        
I'd met Diego when he was thirty-one and I was twenty-five, at a party he threw at his apartment on East Fourteenth Street. When I'd rung the bell, he'd opened the door and done a double take. I was pleased by his show of interest, but I had to look away, for if he was thunderstruck, I was more so. He was blond and all-boy, sexy like a rugby player, and though I'd heard from our mutual friend that he was Argentine, I noticed he spoke with a slight twang, like someone out of Texas.
        
The inflection puzzled me for a long time, till I realized he'd picked up his American listening to Bob Dylan. As for his English, he'd learned that while attending a private Irish school in Buenos Aires, after which he'd gone on to study architecture for a few years before being sidetracked by marriage, two sons, and a job at a radical newspaper. Journalism in the States can be a high-risk profession, but in Argentina in the seventies, it was flat-out dangerous, particularly when practiced at a left-wing publication. The far-right government was waging a Dirty War against anyone who disagreed with its positions, and journalists as a group were high on the hit list. Students and intellectuals were being dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and brought to detention centers, where they were tortured and frequently killed. After a number of Diego's friends had been disappeared, his name turned up in some wrong address books and the police detained him twice. In the year before he fled the country, he got used to sleeping with a pistol under his pillow.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0609603213
• ISBN 13: 9780609603215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256