Anne Boyer’s intense, evocative, terrifying piece about breast cancer (My body feels like it is dying as a side-effect of the drugs that are meant to save me, Journal, 26 September) hit every nerve in me – body and soul – as I have metastatic breast cancer in lungs, liver and brain. (No sympathy needed: currently under control and latterly shrinking.)
Boyer is a poet and writes with profound resonance, hitting on abstraction as well as brave, raw fact. She knows pain and she shares it without softening the impact. Her experience of the US medical system comes over as high on sci-fi digital methodology and the cruder slash, burn and poison. It’s all very familiar. But, crucially, what her story evokes is a lack of empathy in a system predicated on profit, in “the capitalist medical universe in which all bodies must orbit around profit at all times”.
In the UK, our NHS, whatever its strains, limits and breakdowns, does its best to catch us. I praise to the heavens the dedication of NHS staff at the Royal Marsden (and also at Homerton hospital A&E) who have unerringly treated me with patience, respect and empathy (even when I have been difficult). My treatment has been delivered by people whose medical expertise is underpinned by something that feels, dare I say it, like a kind of love. Boyer’s terrible experience throws into stark context what global big pharma and its political lackeys and lickspittles would like to do to us.
If any more of the NHS is sold off US style, our medical world will lose the heart that contributes to keeping so many of us alive.
Melanie McFadyean
London
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