Number of words: 351<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The benefits and dangers of actual medicine provide the hobson\u2019s choice that Laurel Lee, a thirty-year-old Oregon mother with Hodgkin\u2019s disease, has to make. Her hospital journal, walking through the Fire, published in 1977, shows her enduring not only the pain and vomiting and balding that are the normal consequences of radiation therapy, but also the possibility that the child with whom she is pregenent will be born retarded as a result of the treatment the mother undergoes to save her own life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her religious faith guides her to make the decision both to submit to the therapy and to resist an abortion Caught in \u201ca very firing squad of circumstances\u201d (including a lack of money and her husband\u2019s desertion a few days after she comes home from the hospital), Laurel Lee remains as faithful and humorous as Lewis is doubtful and depressed. Her cheer is never gooey or mindless; she seems endowed by an authentic optimism and fortitude as she puts up with the unthinking cruelties of doctors (During a lymphangiogram she asks how long certain chemicals will remain in her body; \u201cOh, for years,\u201d a technician replies.) Rather than waste time in resentment Laurel Lee spends her depleted energies on the approachable. She tells Dr. Cris Maranze how she can<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201clive on fifteen dollers a week for groceries. It was a life-style that made my mind as sharp as a stockbrocker over the price trends of inseason produce……She wanted to know the stories of a lady at home, and I wanted to know the stories of a lady as a doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One emerges from this journal certain that its auther\u2019s inner life survived because she remained so avid an observer of the one outside her. Not only are there her children to be attended to (\u201cMathew found in a plastic bag of fruit one more mottled than the rest. \u2018Look Mom, it\u2019s got Hodgkin\u2019s diesease\u2019\u201d), but also doctors to observe and classify and unexpected empathies to chart: \u201cI suffered from many of the common geriatric problems.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n