ELIA KAZAN : THE DEATH OF HIS WIFE BARBARA LODEN

 

Excerpted from Google Books

Then one day she stood naked before me, took my hand, and put it on her left breast. "Do you feel it?" she asked.

I found a lump there.

It was January of 1978.  She died in September 1980, on the fifth.  Here is a record of what happened in those thirty three months.

As soon as she found the lump in her breast, she did what a well trained actress does, she researched it, read books, interviewed friends, particularly one friend, a woman who had come through it - "at least so far." She consulted physicians, weighed their advice, came to her own conclusions. The record is notable for her desperate wavering from one course to another. What I saw when it was over was that no one, no expert oncologist, no spiritualist, has the vaguest idea of what to do about cancer.  We live in the dark.

...she was looking for a way to deal with it that didn't call for an operation. Reading books of the subject and a magazine called East-West, she decided to become a vegetarian and undertake a macrobiotic diet.  She came upon the writings of Michio Kushi, a Japanese doctor who'd had some success treating cancerous patients with diet and acupuncture, she went to the Acupuncture Center of Massachusetts and adopted his wheat plant  juice diet, which she found distasteful, and the macrobiotic diet of kale, brown rice, no meat.  A consultation with Kushi drew this opinion that the problem was not in her breast but in her liver. He said her liver was "feeble." Ginger presses were to be applied to her liver area.

(Barbara had other consultations and resisted having the lump removed due to the fact that permission pre surgery was that the entire breast as well as muscle could be taken off as well. I believe this is still a standard permission. About two years before she died she did have the lump removed.  She continued to try what we would call Holistic or New Age remedies but as the disease progressed she did try radiation and then chemo - what she dreaded most.)