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
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