No Longer Afraid
Sanford
1992
Our pal Doris is back with another in depth look at childhood cancer as part of the Children of Courage series. (Please check the category of “Doris Hall of Infamy” for more examples.)
Our child hero is Jaime is diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo chemotherapy. Unfortunately for Jaime, she is concerned about dying and Dad assures her she is going to be fine and that they shouldn’t talk about it, since it was Christmas. After Christmas Jaime heads to the hospital where she is screaming and crying through the chemo treatment. Her hair falls out and she makes a reference to Kojak and Eva Gabor. Jaime loves horses, so she ends up with a horse donated by the Make a Wish foundation. The reader never does find out if she beats cancer or what she eventually does with the horse. She is, however not afraid of the dark. Must be some good chemo.
Mary
The Doris posts are always a bright spot in the “Awful Library Books” day! Jaime sleeping with the horse head brigs to mind
Jack Woltz in the Godfather.
The instant I saw the picture, I knew it must be Doris. Wasn’t it Caligula who slept with his horse?
Maybe the horse sleeping with Jaimie is, Latawnya, The Naughty Horse..She did say no to drugs too.
Where is JIm? I miss his witty comments
I would sincerely choose death over chemo because I’m emetophobic and just the thought of being heavily nauseated all the time terrifies me more than the cancer itself. I even read that you shouldn’t eat any foods you really like just before treatment because just the thought of them afterwards will be stomach-turning, even if you know it wasn’t the food itself that made you sick. 🙁
I believe they are working on ways to ameliorate that problem — I read something about it recently. But of course I hope you will never have to make such a choice!
Maybe you should wait until you are in that situation before making such a statement.
In my case, I was given an anti-anxiety medication and an anti-nausea medication to take in the morning before chemo. It turns out that if you’re anxious about being nauseated, the nausea is worse — but if you’re not, you often don’t experience nausea at all (our wonderful brains!). Of course, each person’s experience will have unique features, and I hope you’re never in a position to find out if this works for you, but it did for me. I had four treatments, two weeks apart, and while there were many side effects (hair loss, weariness, lowered immunity, etc.), I was never sick once. And that was more than three years ago.
Getting back to our friend Doris, I don’t think the samples of text included in the post are THAT bad. The art, however, will scar your soul.
A Morgan! Well, Doris has taste in one category. Morgans are the best! They can do anything, from Olympic jumping to plowing. And now that the registry has dropped its prejudices about color, you can see them in just about every shade a horse comes in. Not that a good horse is ever a bad color…
When can I be NO LONGER AFRAID that another Sanford horror show is going to turn up on ALB?
Is Jaime NO LONGER AFRAID because she’s dead?
I think she has since died (Sandford), so eventually they will run out of new ones. Maybe the illustrator went on to bigger and better things?
The Pac-Man analogy only makes slightly more sense than the movie analogy from David Has AIDS. Just slightly.
Also, gotta love Doris & Graci’s own Heart to Heart publishing company as one of the sponsors at the horse show.
Oh sure it’s easy to tell someone they should to get over their phobia when you don’t have it yourself. All you really accomplish is making that person feel more guilty and somehow at fault for their fear. Anyway, no more about the subject please. I knew it was a mistake just mentioning it.
Excuse me, but where do you get off trying to pin the blame on others for supposedly feeling guilty? It’s kind of hypocritical to even claim that you feel guilty when you’re the one who chose to put it out there about how highly you fear chemotherapy, yet you then claimed that people on here were telling you to get over it, when they definitely weren’t. I can’t speak for those who responded to your comment, but I don’t think they like having words put in their mouths.
They only respond to you because they CARE about you. I can only assume you’re mostly of good health and don’t have cancer, so I know that I can’t help but be concerned that this is just one of several posts that you’ve talked about dying in. When someone makes multiple posts discussing or contemplating their own death, I can’t help but be concerned. You’ve mentioned before that you have depression. I’ve dealt with depression and suicidal thoughts for several years now, I can’t help but worry when I read posts like yours. I’ve given you the suicide hotline’s number before, but I’ll give it to you again. Maybe you won’t appreciate me doing so, maybe you’ll even be angry at me like you seem to be with these other people just trying to help, but that’s okay. If it gets you to consider talking to somebody and getting the help you may need, I’ll take a little anger now for your peace and happiness later. I know that I care about you, and so does everyone else on here. I wish you could see that.
1-800-273-8255
What kind of jerk little kids make fun of another kid with cancer????????????
FWIW the pattern of the quilt on the cover is called Turkey Tracks.
I swear that line about who wants to look like Eva Gabor when you’re ten years old first came from that Erma Bombeck book about kids with cancer. Interestingly, the author of My Sister’s Keeper snatched a few lines from that book as well.
Ok, I just flipped through Erma Bombeck’s 1989 book I Want To Grow Hair, I Want To Grow Up, I Want To Go To Boise, and not only is the Eva Gabor joke in there, but “Is your hair coming or going,” “my father is Kojak,” “I just joined the marines,” and scaring other kids by revealing their baldness and claiming it is because of lack of vegetables. Jodi Picoult used the trick about drinking urine (really apple juice) and the patient observing that she hoped the doctor took better care of their patients than the dying plants in their office in My Sister’s Keeper. Seemed like there were some others too, but it’s been a while since I read it. These were interviews of real kids who were facing cancer, and these authors stole their stories. REALLY, Doris?
So, in addition to everything else, Doris was a plagiarist?