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Whole New Life:An Illness And A Healing

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One test of a good book is this: does it change the way you live your life or how you look at people. Reynolds Price, professor of English at Duke University, explores in this work a theme that hits everyone but that we don't often consider, or wish to consider, that is, the effect of major trauma on one's life and the life of one's friends, and perhaps everyone else around you.

RP tells the story of his own experience with spinal cancer in a bold, unflinching, but intensely personal way. One of the themes of the work is how profoundly a patient is affected by the attitudes and communication habits of medical care professionals. While he has tremendous praise for those who showed loving concern for him in his difficult times, he also wonders why some were so callous. For instance, he was informed of his tumor by two doctors while lying on a gurney in a crowded hallway. "What would those tow splendidly trained men have lost if they'd waited to play their trump til I was back in the private room for which Blue Cross was paying our mutual employer, Duke [University], a sizable mint in my behalf?"

Also wonderful in this book are his lessons/recommendation for those who have undergone similar tragedies such as this: "Generous people - true practical saints, some of them boring as root canals - are waiting to give you everything on Earth but your main want, which is simply THE PERSON YOU USED TO BE."

For me at least, this book helped change how I look at people, and I hope, will give me strength to deal with the traumas that will undoubtedly come someday to me and those I love.

I was sitting at the edge of a lake when I read A Whole New Life. I had finished by own book about the cancer experience and begun traveling to talk about the psychosocial (read emotional) issues of healing from such an experience. And then I read the words "the best thing the radiologist could have said to me was the old Reynolds Price is dead, who do you want to be now." It summarized for me much of my searching for what I had tried to say about what had happend tome. My old life is gone, was over the day they found the lump. I had forged a new one, but wish that someone along the way had told me that the cancer journey means becoming someone different -- and I think better. Thanks Reynolds Price. I recommend your book every time I speak.

If you are interested in how a man copes with the precipitate fall from health to paraplegia and near-death in a horifyingly short time, read this book. If you are interested in how a person copes with agonizing, intractable pain, which a wide variety of medical treatments are unable to affect, read this book -- and learn about how biofeedback, to his surprise, enabled him to continue to endure his pain but ignore it. An inspiring book that shows what an extraordinary human spirit is capable of enduring and overcoming, if it must.

I took a long time to read this book so that I could think about all that Mr. Price said, there was so much--about being a person struck down with a "catastrophic" illness, what it is like to lose the ability to walk or do anything else with your legs, about having cancer and wondering when it is coming back, navigating a large medical complex, about being a different person because of it all, about embracing that different person rather than resisting him, about what is most important about caregivers, doctors, nurses and friends. (Mr. Price has awesome friends who basically would go to the ends of the earth for him). I learned so much and found Mr Price's writing to be so honest and earthy and insightful. i hated coming to the final chapter. but loved what it had to say. i would recommend this book to everyone, it is a wonderful look at one's own humanity and that of others. Please also read "Letter to a Man in the Fire." after you have read "A whole new life." I read them the other way around, but it is more meaningful to read "a whole new life" first. Every member of every medical discipline should read this book--nurses, doctors, physical therapists, and students of all disciplines. As an oncologist, I learned a lot about how patients feel and what they might need.

Stricken with spinal cancer in 1984 at 51, novelist Reynolds Price lived to tell the tale, and what a tale it is. With not an ounce of self-pity, Price recounts his diagnosis, treatment, continuous battle with pain and his "whole new life" as someone who now uses a wheelchair with brutal honesty and humor. If you have ever doubted for an instant that we as individuals are ultimately left to put our lives back together after a traumatic illness, Price's story should put that myth to rest. He alone with the help of hypnosis learned how to deal with constant pain, a subject that many of his doctors ignored.

Mr. Price gives every indication that he has a new and happy life. He certainly has gotten on with it and continues to turn out books almost as rapidly as Joyce Carol Oates. It is fortunate that someone with the literary stature of Price chose to write down his experience. This book, along with Abraham Vergese's book about his experience as a doctor treating AIDS patients in East Tennessee in the early years of the epidemic-- MY OWN COUNTRY-- should be required reading for all med students. If reading these two books has no effect on them, they should get out of medicine and into computers.

A WHOLE NEW LIFE is truly an amazing book and as good as anything Price has ever written. It may be his best effort. I cannot recommend it too highly.

I first read this in 1995, during the long week prior to surgery to remove a growing mass of cancer that, thankfully, has never revisited me. Aside from, once again, being awed by Price's magic with otherwise common words, it was especially comforting to read the very heart of a man whose prose I had read and long admired, someone who had survived a similar experience. Price is, hands down, my favorite writer.

This is a moving account of one man's 10 year struggle with a cancer along the spine, which left him a paraplegic. He vividly describes his unrelenting battle with searing pain and his final coming to grips with his condition. It's written in very hard hitting terms.

Price is the prize winning author of some 32 books, including many novels, plays, and volumes of poetry. In 1984 he discovered that he had a 10 inch long tumor along the spine, starting just below the hairline. Little by little, the life that he used to have was obliterated. And yet through almost all of it, he continued writing. He was blessed with the help of a vast number of friends. His recounting of the help these friends gave him reads like a who's who of American culture: Leontyne Price, Philip Roth, Stephen Spender, John Updike, and so on. Curiously, he claims that in all those years, he "never once saw the open revulsion that so many cancer patients report. I watched, but never saw a frown, no one ever flinched visibly at my approach, no one ever pulled back from a handshake. If anyone ever felt I was somehow contagious or awful to watch, they hid it well and have gone on hiding it." (p.48)

On the other hand, he also tells what it was like to be in the grips of a medical system that in so many ways was technically competent (doctors are trained to "work on machines, not sentient creatures"), but at times incapable of humane treatment. He bitterly proposes: "Maybe we have the right to demand that such a flawed practitioner display a warning on the office door or on the starched lab coat, like those on other dangerous bets--Expert technician. Expect no more. The quality of your life and death are your concern." (p. 146)

Price sums up his experience with some hard hitting advice for anyone struck by grave illness or other physical or psychic trauma:

"1. You're in your present calamity alone, far as this life goes. If you want a way out, then dig it yourself, if there turns out to be a trace of a way. Nobody--least of all a doctor--can rescue you now, not from the deeps of your own mind, not once they've stitched your gaping wound.
2. Generous people--true practical saints, some of them boring as root canals--are waiting to give you everything on Earth but your main want, which is simply the person you used to be.
3. But you're not that person now. Who'll you be tomorrow? And who do you propose to be from here to the grave, which may be hours or decades down the road?"

Considering the help most of us receive from friends and family, and the help that Price himself acknowledges having received, his first point is ironic. He deals with the 3rd point by passionately urging us to choose life: "Come back to life, whoever you'll be. Only you can do it."(p. 185) "Never give death a serious hearing till its ripeness forces your final attention and dignified nod." (p. 186)

This is a book about severe illness and recovery. It is a true story of hope and healing told without self-pity. Price writes of being faced with a diagnosis of severe cancer of the spine. "Some vital impulse spared me needing to reiterate the world's most frequent and pointless question in the face of disaster - Why? Why me? I never asked it; the only answer is of course: Why not?"

In the same candid, sometimes funny, yet always affecting words, the popular and prolific author tells of his battle with disease. First struck down in 1984, he suffered through surgery, days of agonizing pain and was eventually confined to a wheelchair, unable to function professionally or personally.

He later sought treatment with a hypnotist at Duke University's psychiatric department with beneficial results. Throughout, Price gives credit to the power of prayer, which he calls "the first strong prop beneath my own collapse."

This is not only the story of an illness and recovery, it is the saga of resolve when confronted with a frightening enemy, and it is a tale of family and friendships, the human network that supports us.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

Should be mandatory reading of all Medical Students and Residents. Disease process as seen and documentd by a patient. The physical, emotional, and spiritual swings a patient goes through during a long protracted illness.

Reynolds Price died just ten days ago, a sad occasion that prompted me to finally pick up and read his 1994 memoir, A WHOLE NEW LIFE. I'd been a Price reader since my college days when, in 1969, I read his first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Since then I'd read The Surface of Earth and a couple of his other exquisitely introspective southern novels. So reading this memoir about his pain-filled and courageous struggle with spinal cancer in the mid-80s was something of an eye-opener for me. I hadn't known about his cancer. The style, given its grim subject, is much more direct and starkly stated than other Price books I'd read. Even so, he does manage to wax philosophic here and there about his years-long ordeal with excruciating pain following multiple surgeries and massive doses of radiation therapy, all attempts to rid him of a long tumor wrapped within his spinal cord - an evil invasive presence he learned to call "the eel." He was left a paraplegic with useless legs and little feeling in his body from the chest down and endured years of pharmaceutical cocktails, largely useless attempts to quell his chronic pain. Finally through the methods of hypnosis and biofeedback he learned to live with the pain, which never really left him.

The descriptions of the diagnosis, surgeries and subsequent treatment are necessarily grim, but Price also makes clear his gratitude to many of his doctors, nurses and other caregivers and close friends. One aspect of his sickness and struggles to recover which I found especially interesting and poignant was the way in which the community of writers rallied around Price with letters, calls and visits. Many of them were not even especially close friends, but people who had met him at various events and respected his body of work.

"... far from demonstrating the rivalry and backbiting of which we're often accused - fellow writers helped me especially with phone calls and letters. A stranger to Philip Roth, for instance, approached him in Central Park that July of '84, said 'Reynolds Price has spinal cancer'; and Philip was on the phone to me at once."

Other writers who wrote or called included John Updike, Frederick Busch, Stephen Spender, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Thomas McGuane, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty. He even heard from opera singer, Leontyne Price. Indeed, were Price still with us, I too would write him 'posthaste,' as did Updike.

There are poems interspersed throughout the book, as well as a short selection of poetry at the end of the narrative - all pieces Price wrote during his illness.

In sum, A Whole New Life is perhaps one of the most eloquent and understated records of a grave and painful illness you will ever find. My admirations for Price has increased a hundredfold since reading it; now I want to read his other memoir, CLEAR PICTURES, and perhaps will also seek out his novel, THE TONGUES OF ANGELS. Price taught for over 50 YEARS at Duke. He was 77 when he died on January 20, 2011. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER