Product Description

When Janet Rhys Dent is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, she decides to try to be a "good patient". With any luck, this role will give her the best chance of recovery during the six months of medical testing and treatment that she faces. This book reveals her secret dilemmas and discoveries both inside and outside the hospital. It also records her successes and many failures as she becomes seriously involved in the quest to find out what makes a good patient. Her experiences lead her to reflect on her life, to look further into the roles of patients, to join a support group and to seek information and enlightenment on internet sites and in philosophy and popular self-help methods. What she learns brings about a change in her attitudes, not only to being a patient but also to life and living. As to the essence of being a good patient, she discovers that the answer is simpler and more life-affirming than she had ever imagined. 'Though names and personal details have been changed for the sake of others' privacy, all the episodes in the book are true, real-life events. I portray the new world I am thrown into; the search for knowledge about it; the people I meet; my attempts to understand and trust the hospital staff, system and treatment; and my failures and successes in adapting to many other challenges both outside and inside the hospital.' - Janet Rhys Dent, in the Introduction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #604019 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 130 pages

NURSING STANDARD
I dread patient stories about their cancer experience. They so often focus exclusively on their own journey and their writing is used as catharsis or to spread unresolved anger. This book is the exception. Using an honest account of her feelings and reactions, Janet Rhys Dent takes the essence of what she is experiencing and thinks how that might chime with other people. Some observations are telling and provide health professionals with new perspectives on their services. The text balances a personal account with an analytic approach that would be useful for patients and health professionals.

PSYCRITIQUES
Replete with insights regarding the experience of illness from essayists, philosophers, novelists, sociologists, and poets ranging from Susan Sontag, Ted Hughes, and David Hume, to Ian McEwan, Jane Kenyon, Martin Heidegger, Anatole Broyard, and Lance Armstrong. The strength of this book is in its rather ordinary story of a woman facing breast cancer, her realization of the community she shares with so many other survivors, and her search for the meaning in her illness. How she experiences the shifts in her life wrought by cancer is illuminating and insightful and weaves in commentary on sickness from a vast array of writers in a cogent, page-turning narrative.

NURSING STANDARD
The text balances a personal account with an analytic approach that would be useful for patients and health professionals.

Customer Reviews

A beautiful story with deeper meanings
Medical notes only tell one aspect of a patient's story. This is Janet Rhys Dent's remarkable story of the other changes that illness brings - whether we want it to or not.

At the outset the author is apprehensive. She wants to remain unchanged by her illness and stay the same person. She is sure that this is the kind of intrepid gutsiness that makes a good patient. But she finds that her ways of being - as a mother, musician, Welsh exile, and family doctor's wife etc - are coming into conflict with her new role as a patient. She begins to realise that she is changing despite herself. Maybe there are other ways of being a good patient?

There are lots of vivid accounts of the author's experiences - such as the time when her arm is paralysed as a side effect of an operation but no one, not even the medical staff, believes her. Though on this particular occasion the medical staff are slow to catch on, overall she gives a warm and balanced account of her encounters with medical professionals.

Janet has excellent powers of observation and amplifies them with references to literature, philosophy, self help gurus, and illness experts. This is a beautifully written story with deeper meanings.

A compelling read
This is a well-written and extremely readable book with a good balance of compelling, vivid accounts of the author's experiences and considered, well-informed analyses of the patient's position. She combines the personal and the specific with a good overview of academic writing on the subject in a work which will I'm sure strike a chord with many patients and ex-patients and should also be instructive to a range of healthcare providers.

The best kind of medical story that gives information on many levels
As a doctor working in narrative medicine, I think this book is one of the best reflections I know on illness. The analysis of the power relationships beween patient and medical staff is fine and sensitive and so is the writer's growing understanding of the changes that illness brings - not just for ill but also, surprisingly and wonderfully, for good. I absolutely recommend this subtle text to every student of narrative medicine. Other professionals and patients would also find enlightenment in this book.