Product Description
Professor Juanne Clarke has spent her career as a medical sociologist, exploring the public health system and the personal health systems of individuals. One of her books examined how women with breast cancer deal with diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Then her 17-year old daughter Lauren was diagnosed with leukemia, and the theories and paradigms of academe gave way to the real-life struggle of a mother and her daughter for healing and for the best medical treatment possible. Finding Strength details two years in the lives of these two women, from early symptoms and denial, through diagnosis and two years of treatment, to a clean bill of health. Each chapter first describes the events of a particular time … More >>
I was disappointed in this book. I purchased it, and some others, on childhood cancer with a view to finding tools to help me deal with my daughter’s recent diagnosis of cancer. Our own journey is still very new (3 months) but our experience has been quite different from that described by the authors. The book is quite critical of the medical profession as a whole. In the journey with cancer, one finds many many different people. It is difficult to believe that so many experiences can be as negative as described by this text. Maybe we are still in the “honeymoon” phase, of looking to professionals to save our daughter’s life, but in our journey we have come across so many compassionate, knowledgeable, kind and skilled people. There is no doubt that it is important to be a part of the “professional” team and to know everything one can know about your child’s illness, but after reading this book I was left with a negative impression about the relationship between the authors and their health care team. I did enjoy the statistics on childhood cancer; other books are not so detailed, but I was left “cold” by the negative perspective advanced about the medical profession. Surely, Ontario is not so different from Alberta (where our child is being treated) such as to explain such a radically different perspective on pediatric oncology.
I also wished that the authors had described more of the emotional impact on them of battling this journey rather than the academic nature of the text. There were times when I felt that this book was a text for a university or college class, rather than a story of the most difficult challenge a family can face.
I will reread this book as we continue this journey to see if my perspective changes. I hope it does not.
Rating: 2 / 5