The Tender Bud: A Physician’s Journey Through Breast Cancer

E-Book Overview

<EM>The Tender Bud is the moving story of one woman's journey through breast cancer.  The woman in question happens to be a senior psychiatrist of broad learning and deep clinical insight.  Madeleine Meldin weathered the crisis of breast cancer without the support of an immediate family and in the context of ongoing professional burdens.  This book is the journal that she wrote for herself as an aid to coping with the personal upheaval of diagnosis, mastectomy, and the aftermath of treatment.  It was written while these events unfolded.  With arresting candor, Meldin chronicles her emotions at each stage of her odyssey - the recurrent cycles of denial, anxiety, and despair; the conflicting feelings engendered by her physicians, surgeons, and the treatment "establishment" in general; her struggle between resignation and emergent hopefulness.

Unique to Meldin's account is her ongoing juxtaposition of the different dimensions of "having cancer." Simply and gracefully, she chronicles the everyday dimension of cancer, with its obligation to proceed maturely and dispassionately with medical and surgical care, to meet one's professional responsibilities, to maintain the appearances that allow one to carry on with one's life.  Meldin excels at showing how even the most mundane experiences of everyday life - conversations with friends and colleagues, the selection of clothes, a trip to the hairdresser - became saturated with her illness, with her sense of herself as a cancer patient.


E-Book Content

THE TENDER BUD Copyrighted Material THE TENDER BUD A Physician's Journey Through Breast Cancer Madeleine Meldin THE ANALYTIC PRESS 1993 Hillsdale, NJ Copyrighted Material London Copyright © 1993 by T h e Analytic Press All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means without prior written permission of the publisher. Published by The Analytic Press, Inc. 365 Broadway, Hillsdale, NJ 07642 Typeset in 11 point Goudy by Lind Graphics, Upper Saddle River, NJ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meldin, Madeleine. T h e tender bud : a physician's journey through breast cancer / Madeleine Meldin. p. cm. ISBN 0-88163-157-4 1. Meldin, Madeleine—Health. 2. Breast—Cancer—Patient—United States-Biography. 3. W o m e n physicians-United States-Biography. 1. Title. [DNLM: 1, Breast Neoplasms-diagnosis-personal narratives. 2. Breast Neoplasms—therapy—personal narratives. 3. Physicians. W o m e n - p e r s o n a l narratives. WZ 100 M518] RC280.B8M45 1993 362.1'9699449'092-dc20 [B] DNLM/DLC for Library of Congress 92-49967 CIP Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love. Sonnet LXX-William Shakespeare Copyrighted Material I dedicate this book to us women on whose breasts all psychic life finds its foundation. I dedicate it to our breasts, our maternal and womanly fountains of sustenance for children and grownups. I dedicate it to celebrate those eternal sacred mountains, where life begins, tenderness is found, love blossoms, and myth is conceived. I dedicate it to us women who have to surrender one or both of them to preserve our lives. I dedicate it for us to mourn together in choral lamentation the loss of so precious an organ, so sacred a flesh. 1 dedicate it for us to go on knowing that a woman's breast, even if lost to cancerous invasion, does not change the woman who has made her breast the source of love and human rest. That woman is a breast. Copyrighted Material THE TENDER BUD Copyrighted Material Contents Prologue xi 1/Discovery 1 2/The Sacri