The Elephant in the Room: Stories About Cancer Patients and their Doctors

277 Pages·2012·0.755 MB·English

by  Jonathan Waxman (auth.)

The Elephant in the Room

Jonathan Waxman
The Elephant
in the Room
Stories About Cancer Patients
and their Doctors
Author
Jonathan Waxman
Flow Foundation Professor
of Oncology
Imperial College London
ISBN 978-0-85729-894-2 e-ISBN 978-0-85729-895-9
DOI 10.1007/978-0-85729-895-9
Springer London Dordrecht Heidelberg New York
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938120
© Springer-Verlag London Limited 2012
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To Naomi, Thea and Freddie.

About the Author
Jonathan Waxman is Flow Foundation Professor of Oncology
at Imperial College London. He founded The Prostate
Cancer Charity, the first United Kingdom national organisa-
tion promoting research and patient support for this condi-
tion. He is a clinician who has helped develop new treatments
for cancer, which are now part of standard practice. He is the
author of eleven books on cancer, a book on medical negli-
gence law and a novel, The Fifth Gospel. He directs a labora-
tory research group, and a clinical trial group. He has raised
funds for the building of the Hammersmith Cancer Centre
whose spirit aims to combine the best of conventional and
alternative therapies. He helped establish an All Party
Parliamentary Group to improve cancer treatment and ratio-
nalise cancer research throughout the UK. He has developed
and led successful and unsuccessful media campaigns to
rationalise cancer treatments and change government health
policy.
vii

Beginnings: Jimmy’s Gift
This book started life as a conversation between the writer,
J G Ballard, and his doctor. I was his doctor. The conversa-
tions were to be about life and death.
Jimmy had prostate cancer, and the plan for the book had
reached a point where an outline had been sketched and the
content planned. I had put to Jimmy the concept of a project
about cancer. I had suggested the idea of a jointly written
book based around the relationship between a patient and
his specialist. Jimmy and I were hugely excited about the idea
of the book. We intended to spend time together talking
about the impact of cancer on his life, what it really meant to
be a patient, the interactions between doctors and patients,
what the doctor and the patient really thought about, and
what the doctor really meant when he spoke to patients. This
exchange was to be bound by a thread that took in our jour-
neys through life. It was to be a contemporaneous account of
two lives intertwined and interlinked.
So, that’s what had been planned, and the plan was bound
to extend beyond its loosely set outlines and borders.
Jimmy set about writing a book proposal.
But before our project could be realized, darkness struck,
and Jimmy became too poorly to think about writing. And so
the book was never written, and the proposal languished in
my filing cabinets until the moment of Jimmy’s memorial ser-
vice. This celebration of Jimmy’s life was held on the top floor
of the Tate, with great views over the Thames, exotic canapés,
and a gathering of friends and family who had come to cele-
brate Jimmy’s life. We sat together, listening to speeches that
brought together all the parts of Jimmy’s world, speeches
ix