One in 10: Women Living with Breast Cancer
By Diana Ward
Allen & Unwin, 1996. 274 pp., $16.95
Reviewed by Linda Kaucher
One in 10 women will develop breast cancer at some stage, hence the title of Di Ward's book.
I met Di Ward at the anarchist conference when Noam Chomsky was visiting Australia. She told me then that she lived in Tasmania, that she had breast cancer and that she was working on a book about the disease.
A year later she phoned me from a hotel in Sydney, saying she was in town for her book launch.
When I was pregnant for the first time and living in a remote place, I got a great deal of information and support from the shared experience style of the Boston Women's Health Book, which has gone through several reprints since then.
Di's book, sharing the thoughts and experiences of 21 Australian women who have breast cancer, could be a similar source of support and information for women with this disease.
In her introduction, Di says that, when she herself was diagnosed, "The two kinds of material I could not get access to were: strictly medical texts written for practitioners and researchers — the language guaranteed my exclusion even if I could get my hands on them — and the experiential wisdom of breast cancer women".
I have never looked for material about women with breast cancer, but my own experiences with the medical world make it easy for me to believe that there's not much material of this kind around.
If that is the case, this interview-style work will be a welcome publication.
Di gives positive descriptions of the women's own environment in which she interviews them. Most of them, although not identified, seem to live in rural settings.
The recent Four Corners program on X-ray dangers mentioned a study which showed that even among the limited number of doctors who responded to the study, there were 25 different ways being used to deal with breast cancer. This in itself seems to indicate a good reason for people undergoing breast cancer treatment to compare notes.