C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too

Unfortunately, while I'm writing this, John Diamond has already died--a couple of months ago, actually, after a long & exhausting 4-year fight with cancer. I should probably not use the word "fight" though--one of the basic things that the author stresses in this book is that dealing with cancer is not a fight in any way: it's living with the circumstances that you're dealt with, & since you really have no choice, you can't be considered a brave person. Still, after finishing this book, I would have to (partly) disagree with J.Diamond. Humour can be a great weapon & also a very brave behaviour. And John Diamond never lost his sense of humour, up until the very end. At least that's what I felt while I was reading the book: that I was listening to a brilliant, down-to-earth, realistic & yet hopeful person talk about his experience. How cancer affected him, his everyday life, his thoughts, his feelings, & how it affected his family life, too.John Diamond, in this book, does fight but in a different way: he fights alternative medicine that doesn't have a basis in scientific research. He uses lots of well thought out arguments & makes a case in favour of orthodox medicine & the treatments it offers. John Diamond also gives new meaning to the phrase "living life from day to day", not in any new-agey kind of way, but just through the belief that life has a lot to give even when this disease is taking away so much. "Because cowards get cancer too" has been a very interesting read for me. An intelligent, informative, full of details book about living with cancer. But also a funny (sometimes out-loud funny) read that's sure to help & even guide lots of people in their own struggle with disease. In this way, even though it's surely not enough for the late author himself & for his family, John Diamond lives on through this book.

I was deeply touched by this book. Having watched my mother and my wife die of cancer, and knowing that I too will likely go by the same route, the subject is part of me. And being a writer who always longed to write his masterpiece, I feel such an identification with John Diamond who here does indeed write his masterpiece, an unlikely tale from the heart, mind and soul without a trance of cant or any phoniness. I hope he knows how good this book is. It is-believe it or not-a comedic master work, the funniest book I have read in quite a while. He uses humor tempered with rationalism instead of pathos to confront the horror of being torn apart by cancer (and its treatment). I can see Shakespeare reading this and sitting up straight with the realization that not only can this man make those words dance, he can engage our heart.John Diamond is a print and broadcast journalist, a well-known Londoner whom I had never heard of before I picked up this book. Obviously he is a very funny and keenly insightful man who sees things that others miss, a magical wordsmith who did his best work when others might rightly have restricted themselves to wallowing in self pity. He contracts cancer of the tongue and throat at probably the most joyous time in his life with a successful career in full swing and a brilliant second marriage not ten years old. He has two little children under four years of age and he himself is still in his early forties. And then he learns that he has cancer. Within a few months time he loses his ability to eat and to speak and to even breath properly.One of the terrible ironies of this book is the fact that Diamond wrote newspaper columns on the fraudulence of the alternative medicine industry, and put his faith entirely in the hands of the medical establishment. There is something of the spirit of English rationalism and the belief in science that allowed him nonetheless to see his treatment as something positive. Because he was relatively young and had a keen desire to stay alive he was motivated to take the treatment. As he says, he really had no choice. He had a responsibility to his wife and his children and his parents to do whatever was necessary to stay alive. And so he went under the surgeon's knife, he subjected himself to radiation and eventually to chemotherapy, all the while getting worse and worse. As he himself writes on page 91: "No wonder the alternative quacks get away with their fairy dust treatments: you die just as quickly as with the real thing but you feel better about it." He had "the real thing."Nonetheless he can laugh and make us laugh with him. The scene where he tears out the tubes and IVs sticking in him in an attempt to escape the hospital is hilarious. On page 122 he's describing all the gadgets and tubes, etc. he's hooked up to: "There was also a tube connected to a catheter shoved up my urethra and carrying away my urine. (Here's a tip for the gents in the audience. If anyone ever

this is my sixth cancer autobiography in the past couple months, so I have some basis for comparison. diamond's story is certainly the most grisly (head and neck cancers are horrific), the funniest and the most moving. he tells his story with unapologetic humanity, avoiding "hero" speak, entering into his disease from a cerebral path. regular people may find more in common with diamond than world-class cyclist Lance Armstrong--and take greater solice from him.

In April, 1997, John Diamond revealed to his readers (he is a columnist for the London Times) that he had cancer. Thereafter, every week, he chronicled the course of his treatment -- good weeks, bad weeks, horrific weeks, euphoric weeks -- each installment bringing clarity, perspective, and remarkable humor to the task. This book recounts heroic medical efforts, gentle interactions with Diamond's friends, colleagues, children, and his wife, and also the day-to-day realities of a life-devouring dying man -- he goes to parties, plants a garden, gets angry with contractors, buys a dog, endures pain, encounters stupidity, becomes vain, abandons vanity, and all the while keeps telling his story -- sometimes with hope, sometimes with fear, and sometimes with the very real likelihood that there may not be a next week's installment. (As of December, 1999, he is still alive, and still writing, though his condition is now terminal.) You would be lucky to have this man as a friend.

John Diamond puts a psychological Hickman line directly into your heart and it hurts like hell. But there's an overwhelming value to it in the long run. Read this book and you'll never feel the same way about your life again. Wonderful writing and a personality that's both pin-prick-sharp and softly endearing combine to create a book that will stroll into your life and leave you in a state of captive admiration. But how is it possible, you may be asking, to like a book about cancer? Well it's not possible: cancer is way too harrowing ever to be a likeable subject. What is likeable about this book is the man who appears on its pages - re-emerging through each setback with sardonic good humour, curiosity, confidence and his impressively cool take on things. One of the most driving of influences - the strength of his wife Nigella - is conveyed so effectively in so deceptively few words that its light-trace remains in the mind long afterwards. Ironically a voice of the voiceless, this book speaks for just about anyone who picks it up, on all the uncomfortable topics that no-one really knows how to tackle: illness, death, fear, and the uncertainty of life. It's a voice - familiar as a friend at the pub - that's just as forceful whether it stabs you with sorrow or jumps on you with jokes and its power frequently eclipses the horror of the events that have called it forth. Few and far between are the folk who won't identify with those events to some degree or another; unfortunately cancer causes suffering to almost all of us, whether as patients, physicians, supporters or well-wishers. So only the most parochial of readers will fail to understand the near-universal application and appeal of this extraordinary and user-friendly tale. Those of us who welcome it are grateful not only for the accuracy and insight of his talent with words but also for the normalising view it provides of the human side of cancer. His readiness in bothering to talk us through his experiences is valued too: it would be more usual, more understandable and certainly easier for him to retreat into the privacy of a respected but relatively unhelpful silence. This book's a real gift from a writer who has developed the art of being able to philosophically process, for our benefit - and more or less instantly, before inertia sets in or future versions cloud the original - the twists and turns of fate as they arrive. John Diamond, if you read this: many congratulations on a great book and more than anything else, thanks!