One Body: A retrospective by Catherine Simpson

From Amazon

By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine had experienced period pain, childbirth, and early menopause, alongside love and laughter, a career in journalism, and raising two daughters. Like many of her peers, along the way she'd dieted, jogged, sweated, tanned, permed, and plucked—always attempting to conform to prevailing standards of "acceptable womanhood." 

But when a medical crisis comes along, she can no longer pummel her body into submission and is forced to take stock. From growing up on a farm where veterinarians were more common than doctors, and where illness was “a nuisance,” she now faces the nuisance of a lifetime.

One Body is the demystifying, relatable, often hilarious, and sometimes hair-raising story of how Catherine navigates her treatment and the emotions and reflections it provokes. And how she comes to drop the unattainable standards imposed on her body, and simply appreciate the skin she is in.

My thoughts

This is an insight into how one woman coped when she was given the devastating news that she had breast cancer.  Catherine conveys her experience to the reader well, it conveys the way she reacted to the treatment both emotionally and physically.  The book isn't all about the illness she relates details of her life, both past and present.  At the heart of it though is a touch of humour, I think most of us would have to try to find some humour among all the stress of an illenss like cancer, if you didn't it would get you down which wouldn't help at all.   

The following passage from the book made me inwardly laugh a little, at how Catherine felt following the conversation with her friend. 

'I confided in a friend who had been treated recently for cervical cancer. She sounded sad and angry when she told me people had crossed the street to avoid her because they found gynaecological cancers 'so embarrassing'. In that moment, I felt if not lucky, then relieved that I had cancer of the breast, a non-embarrassing cancer nowadays, a sanitised, pink beribboned, commodified cancer.  It underlined for me yet again how ashamed women are made to feel about their bodies.' 

Women should never be made to feel ashamed of their bodies no matter what they may look like, as all women come in different shapes, sizes and colours.  We all have our issues, health problems and things that we have to cope with.  We should not have to cope with the feelings of shame about anything.