Relentless

Part memoir, part indictment, Relentless is one woman's honest and unflinching account of suffering from terminal cancer. In December 2006, Stephanie Greco Larson, a forty-six year old political science professor at Dickinson College, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Oncologists told her that the disease would kill her in mere months. In the four years following her diagnosis, Larson endured being pricked, prodded, cut, injected, ignored, and scolded by doctors who tried to stave off her incurable cancer. Drafted between her diagnosis and death in 2011, Relentless provides one patient's perspective of living and dying with peritoneal cancer in the American medical system, a system she found ill-equipped to hear, treat, and comfort those with aggressive and eventually fatal forms of cancer. From health insurance to hospice care, Larson catalogs the shortcomings of the American healthcare system and its failure to serve those who cannot be cured. Larson deconstructs our society's notion that the ideal cancer patient should be the positive fighter who keeps the messy parts of the disease to herself: I'm more comfortable with the term "cancer victim," but that term is passé. It has been stripped from the discourse by those seeking agency, and ironically, by those who want to empower us. If I call myself a cancer victim, people get unhappy. They don't want to think of me as a victim. I don't fit the cowering, helpless stereotype they have in their heads. So they correct me: "You're no victim"; "You're still here, aren't you"; or the generic "Don't say that. You have to stay positive." So if I'm not a victim or a survivor, and I'm not really living with cancer or necessarily in treatment, what am I? I'd say that I am a "cancer sufferer." I am a cancer sufferer. I have cancer. I suffer from it. I am not always fighting. I am not always in treatment. I am not yet dead from cancer, but I will be in months or years, and until then, my life is fundamentally altered by the presence of cancer and the medical protocols for treating it. I am a cancer sufferer. Like fools, I don't suffer it gladly. Edited and published posthumously, Relentless is Larson's refusal to stay silent about the uncomfortable realities of her treatment and terminal illness. Under the steady hands of Meg Allen, her former student, and David Srokose, her devoted husband, this, her final rallying cry, boldly challenges readers to cease substituting catch phrases like "stay positive" and "think pink" for actual compassion. All profits from this memoir go toward the Stephanie Greco Larson Scholarship at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.