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Layne Christensen

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Picasso’s Woman: A private ma

N A cool morning in
1991, Rosalind
MacPhee received a
shocking piece of news: the
mysterious lump she had
accidentally discovered in her
right breast and ignored for
over a month was malignant.
It was time for tough choices.

Should she have a lumpectomy
or & mastectomy? Radiation or
chemotherapy? How and when
should she fell her family? Her
friends? How would they react?

Faced with the most difficult
decision of her life, MacPhee was
both surprised and angered to dis-
cover a startling lack of information
about a disease that will claim the
lives of 5,400 Canadian women this
year.

“This year in North America,
there would be almost 200.000 new
diagnoses and more than 50,000
deaths (from breast cancer). One
report made a shocking comparison
to put this number in perspective:
57,000 Americans had died in the
nine years of the Vietnam War. ...
‘Then ! thought of ull the stories that
had been written about war und bat-
tlefields. Where were our stories?”

Three years after losing her
breast to a radical mastectomy, the
Lions Bay poet and paramedic has
turned an intensely painful and per-
sonal experience into prose with
Picasso's Woman (Douglas &
Melntyre, $24.95),

MacPhee creates a remarkably
forthright, intimate portrait of her
struggle with breast cancer, how the
disease and treatment turned her life
upside down and propelled her to
become a breast cancer crusader.
What's more, the book is imbued
throughout with her irreverent sense
of humor.

This is a woman who walked
along with friends at her own wake.

“T consider it (the book) the sin-
gic greatest act of insanity in the
world,” says MacPhee, as he pulls

by Wituias

wit

Elune Avils

Susanne Gillies-Smich 2
Sharen Fieath
Uhomas Jones

Aumabel Kershaw

Chris MeGregor

Joho Murphy
Christopher Robson

Sarth Rodgers

Evelyn Jacob
SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

up a chair ina West Side Vancouver
cafe. Insane because at the same
time she was writing the book. the
mother of two was not only recover:
ing from major surgery but also
completing her Masters degree in
Fine Arts and working full time as a
unit chief for the B.C. Ambulance
Service.

“But,” she points out, “f didn’t
know how else to tell people about
the disease.”

Breast cancer, after all, is a par-
ticularly thorny issue. It’s seen as a
woman's disease, and one that has
long been associated with guilt and
shame. It only follows that a book
on the subject would attract a pretty
limited audience.

Surprisingly, MacPhee says
she’s received a phenomenal
amount of feedback — and not just
from middle-aged women with cun-
cer,

“TL talked to a man who said it
was one of the few books written by
a woman where he didn’t feel as if
he were looking in from outside,”
she says.

What we should be thanking
MacPhee for, however, is not so
much for shining a light on a dis-
ease that is seldom discussed in
polite society, but for daring to tell
her story.

“Ata time in my life when f had
believed that my dreams could take
me anywhere, [ now feared I was as
old as I would ever be,” she writes.

See Picasso's Woman page 24

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THURSDAY OTH OCTOBER

SHOW RUNS
PREDAY FTO
SATURDAY TH
THURSDAY Tote
FRIDAY tatu
SATURDAY 15TH

Wednesday. October 12, 1994 — North Shore News ~ 24

made public domain

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NEWS photo Cindy Goodman

WEST VANCOUVER author/poet/paramedic/cancer survivor Rosalind MacPhee and Freyja, her
family’s harlequin Great Dane, contemplate the view from Lions Bay.

(Main Street sr bolween 26th - 25th ‘Ave! s)

- Come and enjoy this year’ s nostalgic.
7 street party and re-discover the past
with quality merchandise. “

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