Cancer Care for the Whole Patient: Meeting Psychosocial Health Needs
Author: National Academies Press
Cancer care today often provides state-of-the-science biomedical treatment, but fails to address the psychological and social (psychosocial) problems associated with the illness. This failure can compromise the effectiveness of health care and thereby adversely affect the health of cancer patients. Psychological and social problems created or exacerbated by cancer—including depression and other emotional problems; lack of information or skills needed to manage the illness; lack of transportation or other resources; and disruptions in work, school, and family life—cause additional suffering, weaken adherence to prescribed treatments, and threaten patients' return to health.
Today, it is not possible to deliver high-quality cancer care without using existing approaches, tools, and resources to address patients' psychosocial health needs. All patients with cancer and their families should expect and receive cancer care that ensures the provision of appropriate psychosocial health services.
Cancer Care for the Whole Patient recommends actions that oncology providers, health policy makers, educators, health insurers, health planners, researchers and research sponsors, and consumer advocates should undertake to ensure that this standard is met.
Interesting textbook: Heroes among Us or God Has a Dream
Elegy for Iris: A Memoir
Author: John Bayley
With remarkable tenderness, John Bayley recreates his passionate love affair with Iris Murdoch--world-renowned writer and philosopher, and his wife of forty-two years--and poignantly describes the dimming of her brilliance due to Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a story about the ephemeral beauty of youth and the sobering reality of what it means to grow old, but its ultimate power is that Bayley discovers great hope and joy in his celebration of Iris's life and their love. In its grasp of life's frailty and its portrayal of one of the great literary romances of this century, Elegy for Iris is a mesmerizing work of art that will be read for generations.
New York Observer - Regina Marler
This is a sad and loving reflection, but it can be read as the ultimate diaper-airing...this is a sickbed memoir, grossly limited and limiting. While Mr. Bayley offers an intimate view of his senile wife, he cannot offer a portrait of a brilliant and esteemed writer -- the Iris, presumably, for whom one would write an elegy.
Mirabella - Francine Prose
A testament to a love that has endured and transcended the most terrifying ravages of illness and old age.
The New York Times - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
What makes [Iris Murdoch] alive in these pages is her husband's love, which is so absolute and mysterious that it pervades every word he writes....What brought them together was...the discovery of the children in each other....in Elegy for Iris, Mr. Bayley celebrated his beloved partner's survival.
Gail Caldwell
Beautiful and heartbreaking. —The Boston Globe
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
I would neverhaving read [Bayley's] literary criticismhave suspected him capable of this book: a portrait of a thriving marriage we must regard as close to unique. —The Women's Review of Books
Book Magazine
Tender vignettes of Iris' active and somewhat unconventional past are contrasted with heart-rending glimpses of her life since she became of victim of Alzheimer's in 1994.
Publishers Weekly
It is seldom that someone at once so brilliant and so visible as novelist Iris Murdoch develops Alzheimer's disease in full public view; seldom, also, that a sufferer from this dreadful malady has so skilled and loving an interpreter by her side.
Bayley, a noted literary critic (and, recently, novelist) in his own right, was married to Murdoch for 40 years, and part of the charm of this enormously affecting memoir lies in the ways in which he shows the affections of old age as in no way slower than the passions of youth. Murdoch was already a dashing and rather mysterious figure when she and Bayley met in the Oxford of the '50s; she was a philosophy don at a women's college who had just written a much-admired first novel; he was a bright, rather naive graduate student. Something mutually childlike clicked between them, however, and a naked swim in the River Isis (which later became a fond habit lasting even into Iris' illness) cemented their loving friendship. Writing with great tenderness and grace, Bayley evokes their long, warm, mutually trusting marriage, and introduces in the gentlest way the moments, four years ago, when he realized that his wife's sense of reality and of herself were slipping away. At the end of her life she became anxious, repetitious and often nonsensical in her speech, but was still suffused with the same quizzical sweetness and absolute trust he loved in her from the start. Few people with an Alzheimer's partner could be as self-effacing and endlessly patient as Bayley, but in a way almost as mysterious as the creation of a Murdoch novel, he evokes depths of understanding and warmth that seem scarcely ruffled by the breezes of the conscious mind.
This beautiful book could hardly help being deeply consoling to anyone thus afflicted; it is also a compelling study of the overthrow of a remarkable spirit.
The New York Times Book Review - Mary Gordon
This splendid book enlarges our imagination of the range and possibilities of love.
The Women's Review of Books - Carolyn G. Heilbrun
I would never, having read [Bayley's] literary criticism, have suspected him capable of this book: a portrait of a thriving marriage we must regard as close to unique.
Boston Globe
"ELEGY FOR IRIS is beautiful and heartbreaking...a love poem writ in melancholy, an ode to the past and the stratosphere of commitment that such a past ensures."
Kirkus Reviews
A sweet if somewhat old-fashioned memoir about a literary marriage. Bayley, author of the novel The Red Hat and a noted critic, met novelist and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch (Jackson's Dilemma) while he was teaching at Oxford's St. Anthony's College and instantly came under her sway.
What People Are Saying
John Bayley
A solitary life is splendid, provided you can lead it with someone else. That's paradoxical, but it's extremely true in our case. We've always had that sort of life; she had her life, and I had mine. And now one can have that same sort of thing. I do have that solitary life because she's there, and I couldn't have it on my own. It would simply disappear....She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.
-- Interviewed in The New York Times, December 20, 1998
Dan Rather
Elegy for Iris has seduced me, with its painstaking reconstruction of the love between two people.
Table of Contents:
| Then | 1 | |
| Now | 223 |
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