Analysis of Topic of Cancer by Christopher Hitchens

This essay was about the author waking up one morning feeling so ill that he had found it difficult to move from his bed. He remembers struggling to get up and call emergency services, being diagnosed with cancer, and eventually coming to terms with the diagnosis. He said that the five stages of grief didn't really apply to him in this case, and that he had been cheating death for a while now, only to see the Reaper finally catch up with him. He describes his opinion on chemotherapy, or on cancer "treatment", and says that you end up giving up your hair, taste buds, and coherent thought for a few more years on the planet. He felt cheated because he'd had a decade of plans made out, and he'd felt that he'd worked hard enough to earn them. He didn't feel angry about coming down with cancer, regardless of how negatively he did feel. He appears to be a credible author, and was even the editor of the previous' year's Best American Essays. He contributed to the New Statesman, the Nation, the Atlantic, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Vanity Fair in his lifetime before his death in 2011 of cancer. I believe that the author's purpose in writing this essay was to detail the life of a cancer patient. He did bring up that having cancer is always described as a battle, and when someone is free of cancer that they had "won the battle." If they died, however, they "lost the battle." He said that what is always pictured is a valiant internal conflict, but that's not what it feels like at all. Instead, he remembered feeling so powerless against the cancer as he was receiving treatment, almost like a sugar lump dissolving in water. The essay was written for anyone who would be interested in the internal struggle of a cancer patient, or anyone who wondered about the struggle for hope.

This is a picture of the author when he was still alive, smoking a cigarette, which is a known cause of cancer.