Journaling Cancer in Words and Images: Caught in the Clutch of the Crab
Journaling Cancer in Words and Images is a raw, first-person diary with paintings of the author's experience with uterine cancer. Harriet Wadeson is an art therapist. She never intended to publish the journal and the artwork done during her cancer treatment, but began to think that it might be meaningful for others. For me, it definitely was.I read Journaling Cancer during the four weeks between my abnormal mammogram and my biopsy results, which showed that I did not have cancer. While reading the book, I felt as if I were having conversations with a dear friend. I was drawn by her self-doubts, her occasional querulousness, her feeling let down at times by her partner, despite being so very grateful to her for her care. Harriet Wadeson does not mince words. She tells it like it was, the transcendent and the boring, the disgusting physical details of bowel troubles, the pain, fear, fatigue, nausea, and what helped her through: friends, family, and the ability to create. Ms. Wadeson writes with rare honesty, bringing the reader into a more vulnerable, real state. One cannot read Journaling Cancer with the mind alone. It involves the heart and the spirit too.The book is accompanied by a CD of color images of the artwork that is an integral part of the book. As I viewed the CD, it was again like sitting with a friend as she told me why she chose particular image's for a page, and how she created them. Although Harriet Wadeson speaks of pain and suffering, the images are preponderantly beautiful, uplifting: flowers, nature, the strong leopard, a transforming butterfly, and Harriet Wadeson herself, with her long, abundant white hair, which she lost, then regrew differently.Journaling Cancer would appeal to therapists, art therapists, and anyone working with someone with cancer, loving someone who has cancer, and perhaps someone living with cancer, although as Harriet Wadeson points out, it can be difficult to read about someone else's cancer experience while you are going through your own. --Jeanne Bereiter, MD, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic