In spring 2020, at a time when the world was shutting down and every aspect of daily life was plunged into confusion, journalist and author Helen Epstein was experiencing another, more individual crisis. That May, she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, which makes up 3.5% of all new cancer cases annually. Shocked and scared, Epstein began chronicling all aspects of her treatment journey––procedures, emotions, consultations––in a project that brings cohesion to her experience of the disease. Set to be published in May 2022, two years after her diagnosis, Getting Through It: My Year of Cancer During Covid is an authoritative narrative of struggle and survival, written with a determination and honesty that communicates the incomparable difficulties of cancer treatment.
Formatted like a journal, with chronological entries, Getting Through It takes the reader through Epstein’s treatment journey with astonishing intimacy. Epstein shares the details of her treatment with clear and straightforward language. Her project, stated in the book’s introduction, is to write for the women who “want to hear how another woman got through treatment and came out standing.” Throughout her treatment, Epstein goes through episodes of intensive research, searching up operations, therapies, and outcomes. Her memoir, therefore, is a contribution to the field of literature that occasionally failed to provide her with all the answers she needed during her crisis.
Epstein’s desires to view her condition as accurately and optimistically as possible occasionally clash. Yet she manages to represent the moments in which her fear and apprehension felt overwhelming while still communicating the importance of refusing to be overwhelmed. Right after her diagnosis, Epstein notes: “I struggled to keep a sense of control over my life.” This feeling of loss of control is only exacerbated by a pair of strokes that occur as she begins chemotherapy. Epstein has to rely on her husband’s vivid recollections in order to convey this event, as her memory of that episode is blurred. Her husband, Patrick, is supportive of her throughout the ordeal, of which Epstein is, of course, appreciative. However, she doesn’t shy away from representing the brutal reality of how her own experience as the patient occasionally clashes with the needs of her husband as her caretaker. In a particularly moving sequence, Epstein describes her emotional reaction to Patrick’s devotion to her:
“Everything else about him enraged me…. Whenever a thought crossed his mind, he needed to inform me immediately, no matter what I was doing, like a toddler. I knew that he had been in emergency mode since my strokes. I knew he was afraid I’d die and leave him alone. I understood PTSD. But in the moment, I didn’t care.”
Epstein’s commitment to telling the truth feels important in the genre of medical memoirs; she doesn’t paper over the potentially unflattering difficulties, physical or psychological, that arise from the trauma of disease.
Another theme that Epstein returns to is that of the difficulty of keeping up interpersonal relationships while being treated for cancer. She writes honestly about how treatment drained her capacity to be a supportive and social person: “By Chemo Cycle Three, I had no slack to cut anyone, no resources to humor or console or excuse.” Her loss of energy due to the treatment also affects her ability to function. She writes of her struggle to accept her dependence on others’ support and wisdom. After chemotherapy, the recommended treatment course is Brachytherapy, a kind of internal, site-specific radiation treatment used to treat certain forms of cancer. Epstein chronicles her concern and fear over this treatment; she even contemplates refusing it, stopping with chemotherapy. The question of bodily autonomy is relevant here: for a woman ceding control of her body and reproductive organs to the care of doctors, it feels majorly radical to consider dissent. Ultimately, Epstein decides to go through with Brachytherapy after more research and conversations with doctors, but her questioning is important, reminding the reader that one’s body remains one’s body even as it is also a battleground between cancer and intensive therapies.
The backdrop of the year 2020 means that Getting Through It also functions in some way as a pandemic memoir, a genre which is sure to explode in the coming years. Epstein continually makes reference to the political events of the year––the Black Lives Matter protests of the spring and summer, the election in the fall, and, of course, the transformed medical landscape thanks to Covid-19. When Epstein is first contemplating having to undergo chemotherapy, she thinks optimistically of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who at the time was twenty years into a cancer diagnosis and received regular chemotherapy even as she continued to be an active and essential member of the Supreme Court. When Ginsberg dies in late 2020, Epstein notes this event with a kind of detached shock. This book provides a first illuminating glance at how the turmoil of 2020 and 2021 will affect the way books are written. Epstein’s strategy of “taking it day by day,” processing the insane upheaval of her life one development at a time, is likely to resonate with many who experienced a personal crisis at the same time as the worldwide calamity of the pandemic unfolded.
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