Welcome to Cancerland: My Humorously Toxic Journey

Welcome to Cancerland: My Humorously Toxic Journey PDF Author: Ritch Gaiti
Publisher: Sedona Editions
ISBN: 9780692636800
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
"Think of it this way," my Thoracic Surgeon explained. "The right lung is divided into three sections, called lobes. Each is about the size of a folded up slice of pizza." He saw the curious look on my face. "Regular, not Sicilian," he clarified. "It's very hard to fold Sicilian slices." I nodded; clearly he had been trained well. * * * Doc P, my Pulmonologist, studied the computer screen. This could not be a good sign. Of course, just having a Pulmonologist is not a good sign. If I had a list of Things I Don't Want to Have, Pulmonologist would be near the top, way ahead of Periodontist and a notch behind Criminal Lawyer. Of course, I wouldn't want to have to have a Parole Officer, a Bankruptcy Attorney or Shingles either. * * * I had never given much thought to the nature of my demise, should that ever occur. However, if I had conjured up a list of potential causes, cancer would not have even been considered for consideration. However, if it had appeared on my list as one of my potential executioners d' jour, it would have been in the quest of completeness, not because I considered it within the realm of possibility. And, certainly it would have fallen to the very bottom, right after being eaten by sharks in my basement. To be clear, I have never had sharks or any other predatory fish in my basement, except for Attila, my kosher goldfish. Moreover, I live over forty miles from the ocean and there is no way that a shark could get to my house - and if it did, it is unlikely that it could open the basement door. The prevailing logic notwithstanding, I opted for shark-proofing my house as part of the termite guarantee. To wit, I had a slightly greater chance of being attacked by sharks in my basement than getting cancer. I was wrong. An entertaining and informative trip for anyone who has had cancer or plans to never get cancer or just likes to be entertained. **Previously published under the title: Fuck you Cancer ..and the Cell You Rode In On

Welcome to Cancerland: My Humorously Toxic Journey

Welcome to Cancerland: My Humorously Toxic Journey PDF Author: Ritch Gaiti
Publisher: Sedona Editions
ISBN: 9780692636800
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Think of it this way," my Thoracic Surgeon explained. "The right lung is divided into three sections, called lobes. Each is about the size of a folded up slice of pizza." He saw the curious look on my face. "Regular, not Sicilian," he clarified. "It's very hard to fold Sicilian slices." I nodded; clearly he had been trained well. * * * Doc P, my Pulmonologist, studied the computer screen. This could not be a good sign. Of course, just having a Pulmonologist is not a good sign. If I had a list of Things I Don't Want to Have, Pulmonologist would be near the top, way ahead of Periodontist and a notch behind Criminal Lawyer. Of course, I wouldn't want to have to have a Parole Officer, a Bankruptcy Attorney or Shingles either. * * * I had never given much thought to the nature of my demise, should that ever occur. However, if I had conjured up a list of potential causes, cancer would not have even been considered for consideration. However, if it had appeared on my list as one of my potential executioners d' jour, it would have been in the quest of completeness, not because I considered it within the realm of possibility. And, certainly it would have fallen to the very bottom, right after being eaten by sharks in my basement. To be clear, I have never had sharks or any other predatory fish in my basement, except for Attila, my kosher goldfish. Moreover, I live over forty miles from the ocean and there is no way that a shark could get to my house - and if it did, it is unlikely that it could open the basement door. The prevailing logic notwithstanding, I opted for shark-proofing my house as part of the termite guarantee. To wit, I had a slightly greater chance of being attacked by sharks in my basement than getting cancer. I was wrong. An entertaining and informative trip for anyone who has had cancer or plans to never get cancer or just likes to be entertained. **Previously published under the title: Fuck you Cancer ..and the Cell You Rode In On

To Hell with All That

To Hell with All That PDF Author: Caitlin Flanagan
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 0316186538
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
From The New Yorker's most entertaining and acerbic wit comes a controversial reassessment of the rituals and events that shape women's lives: weddings, sex, housekeeping, and motherhood.

Natural Causes

Natural Causes PDF Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455535885
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
From the celebrated author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich explores how we are killing ourselves to live longer, not better. A razor-sharp polemic which offers an entirely new understanding of our bodies, ourselves, and our place in the universe, Natural Causes describes how we over-prepare and worry way too much about what is inevitable. One by one, Ehrenreich topples the shibboleths that guide our attempts to live a long, healthy life -- from the importance of preventive medical screenings to the concepts of wellness and mindfulness, from dietary fads to fitness culture. But Natural Causes goes deeper -- into the fundamental unreliability of our bodies and even our "mind-bodies," to use the fashionable term. Starting with the mysterious and seldom-acknowledged tendency of our own immune cells to promote deadly cancers, Ehrenreich looks into the cellular basis of aging, and shows how little control we actually have over it. We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds, and even over the manner of our deaths. But the latest science shows that the microscopic subunits of our bodies make their own "decisions," and not always in our favor. We may buy expensive anti-aging products or cosmetic surgery, get preventive screenings and eat more kale, or throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality. But all these things offer only the illusion of control. How to live well, even joyously, while accepting our mortality -- that is the vitally important philosophical challenge of this book. Drawing on varied sources, from personal experience and sociological trends to pop culture and current scientific literature, Natural Causes examines the ways in which we obsess over death, our bodies, and our health. Both funny and caustic, Ehrenreich then tackles the seemingly unsolvable problem of how we might better prepare ourselves for the end -- while still reveling in the lives that remain to us.

The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies PDF Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439170916
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

The Promise of Happiness

The Promise of Happiness PDF Author: Sara Ahmed
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239278X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets PDF Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1429904658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation

Body Studies

Body Studies PDF Author: Margo DeMello
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134084633
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In recent years, body studies has expanded rapidly, becoming an increasingly popular field of study within anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. This groundbreaking textbook takes the topics and theories from these disciplines, and combines them into one single, easily accessible text for students. Body Studies is a comprehensive textbook on the social and cultural uses and meanings of the body, for use in undergraduate college courses. Its clear, accessible chapters explore, among other things: the measurement and classification of the human body illness and healing the racialized body the gendered body cultural perceptions of beauty new bodily technologies. This book investigates how power plays an important role in the uses, views, and shapes of the body—as well as how the body is invested with meaning. Body Studies provides a wealth of pedagogic features for ease of teaching and learning: ethnographic case studies, boxes covering contemporary controversies, news stories, and legislative issues, as well as chapter summaries, further reading recommendations, and key terms. This book will appeal to students and teachers of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies.

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person PDF Author: Miriam Engelberg
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780060789732
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
a cartoonist examines her experience with breast cancer in an irreverent and humorous graphic memoir.

Mammographies

Mammographies PDF Author: Mary K. DeShazer
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472900986
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.

Avoiding Cancer One Day at a Time

Avoiding Cancer One Day at a Time PDF Author: Lynne Eldridge
Publisher: Avoiding Cancer Now
ISBN: 1592981593
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The mortality rate from cancer hasn't changed in 60 years despite the billions invested to find a cure. Avoiding Cancer One Day At A Time provides solid, practical advice for preventing cancer by avoiding carcinogens and implementing lifestyle/dietary practices that modify cancer causing factors. Combining their experience in family medicine and epidemiology with their passion for disease prevention, the authors provide the most up to date and effective advice for preventing cancer from developing in ourselves and our loved ones. Many ?how to? examples for preventing cancer by being environmentally aware, avoiding infections, living the proper lifestyle and getting the proper nutrition are provided. Chapter by chapter summaries and listings of the latest cancer prevention web sites are great references. Worksheets assist readers in implementing the advice in very tangible ways, and the recipe collection of cancer avoiding meals is a winner!