Jan
26
A Whole New Life: An Illness and A Healing
January 26, 2011 | Tagged cancer, memoir, pain, paraplegia | Leave a Comment
About the Book
While walking with Price across the Duke University campus in the spring of 1984, a colleague noticed Price’s awkward gait. That incident marked the beginning of the novelist’s four-year “collision with spinal cancer and paralysis.” This remarkable memoir recalls the first surgery that failed to stop the tumor (which Price imagined as an “alien and deadly eel”), the radiation treatment that destroyed the nerves in his spine and the use of his legs, the religious vision promising healing, the pain-killing drugs overprescribed by unsympathetic doctors, and the friends and family who rallied around him. Price refused to succumb to self-pity, to ask the pointless tired old question of “Why me?” He writes, “The only answer is of course Why not ?” Now, clear of cancer though not cured, Price has a new life not only as a paraplegic but as a great writer whose creative energies have rebounded.
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