Alice Stewart Trillin - Dealing With Cancer

Dealing With Cancer

Trillin developed lung cancer, apparently as a result of exposure to second-hand smoke during her childhood. She wrote of her experience as a cancer patient in an article titled "Of Dragons and Garden Peas: A Cancer Patient Talks to Doctors", in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1981. Her writing is still used to train doctors to appreciate the illness and its treatment from a patient's point of view. Her personal experience also led Alice to adopt and care for other cancer patients. At her funeral service Nora Ephron described the people under Alice's protection as "anyone she loved, or liked, or knew, or didn’t quite know but knew someone who did, or didn’t know from a hole in a wall but had just gotten a telephone call from because they’d found the number in the telephone book."

In 1979, Alice Trillin learned that her friend's 12-year old son Bruno Navasky had been diagnosed with cancer. A letter she wrote to Bruno, describing her own experiences and attempting to cheer him, was later published in a book form titled Dear Bruno. The book was illustrated by New Yorker artist Edward Koren.

Alice Trillin died on September 11, 2001 (the same day of the September 11 attacks) at the New York Presbyterian Hospital from heart failure resulting from radiation damage to her heart when she was treated for lung cancer in 1976. Eight months before her demise, Trillin's essay "Betting her life" on doctors, illness and family was published in The New Yorker.

Alice and Calvin Trillin were volunteer counselors at actor Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut for children with cancer or serious blood diseases.

Read more about this topic:  Alice Stewart Trillin

Famous quotes containing the words dealing with, dealing and/or cancer:

    Although pretend play is important, it is still the means to an end, not the end itself. Do not make the mistake of thinking a contrived, pretend drama can substitute for real interpersonal comfort in dealing with important emotional issues.
    Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)

    ... dealing with being a lesbian—and part of that is by being politically activist—has caused me to have a less carefree adolescence. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It has its rewards.
    Karina Luboff (b. 1974)

    I’m beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death among Americans. What you don’t know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)