Status Updates From The Undying: Pain, Vulnerab...

“Breast cancer killed Kathy Acker. Kathy Acker did not kill Kathy Acker” - Boyer on a woman who chose not to do chemotherapy.

ALSO THE BREAST CANCER RIBBON IS A STOLEN IDEA??? The pink colored fracking drills, we so for real? The perfume?? I’m very conflicted about my sorority’s philanthropy now.

Boyer is a genius. Writers on illness are often annoying or performative, leaning on the emotional drama of illness instead of unpacking the experience. Boyer writes a dry truth I learned from. And I’m grateful.

Worth reading for the brilliant prose, regardless of health status.

No time off work, no physical therapy, no pain medication after you get a mastectomy…but we’ll give you implants! That’s so crazy. Also finding out that people have cancer fetishes is wild 😭 I like how she says cancer is a “stage of virtue on which others can act.” (120) like her suffering is something for others to profit off of. Last thing, had no idea the environmental effects cancer treatment has.

So like who said “let’s use mustard gas and a bacteria nicknamed ‘red death’” as treatment for breast cancer? They didn’t even help her tumor?They actually gave her more problems that need to be treated with a $7,000 shot of Neulasta?? Then basically saying just deal with these horrible life changing side effects from these treatments that didn’t even work. Or, my favorite, “endure with good humor”

I think so far in the book summarizes perfectly why people don’t want to go to the doctor. Once you’re told something’s wrong, everything changes, life is never the same. “A diagnosed person is liberated from what she once thought of as herself” (Boyer 14). Her diagnoses completely consumes her mind, it’s all she googles (which only tells her she’s going to die). She also has to start chemo (so harsh)