Eyes on the Prize

Of all the essays in chapter 6, I found Selden McCurrie's "Eyes on the Prize" to be the most intriguing and inspiring. Besides that it's written beautifully ("On July 29th I was initiated into a vast unwilling sisterhood..."), it does a great job of chronicling the entire journey of breast cancer. I now know so much more about what a woman faces when she is diagnosed. I didn't know there were so many different choices pertaining to surgery and post-surgery breasts/bras, and I didn't know there were so many different kinds of breast cancer. McCurrie tells the story so that you feel her fear and confusion and frustration and, in the end, happiness with her through the whole piece. Of course, it has a happy ending (she wouldn't really be able to write the essay if it hadn't gone well, I suppose), which is not the case for most breast cancer patients, but then again that's a bit of the point she was making: this is a very scary thing, her situation was particularly serious, she could have died, and now she's a proud survivor, a stronger woman. I laughed out loud when I read the last line of the 2nd-to-last paragraph: "I still tear up when I think of all the women who opened their hearts and their shirts to me, as I made a difficult decision." Love it!