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By Lisa Miller
To be clear, there is nothing personal about having cancer. A diagnosis requires referrals and a staggering number of scans and tests. There are ultrasounds, MRIs, positron emission scans; colonoscopies, bronchoscopies, endoscopies. There are needle biopsies, razor biopsies, or liquid biopsies. Most tests require undressing, or nearly naked, under a dress, waiting in a giant room filled with other terrified strangers also in robes, before coming forward. strangers pushing, prodding, threading, and inserting equipment into or over pieces of the frame that aren’t normally explored. Often, those tests need to be repeated or other tests ordered to rule something out.
“I’ve been naked in front of a lot of other people in my life right now. You kind of lose that feeling that ‘my body is private,'” said Isabel Blumberg, my gynecologist. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, Blumberg was the first user to call me. He told me he also had cancer.
In the video released through Kensington Palace on Friday, Catherine, Princess of Wales, reveals her cancer prestige after more than six weeks of silence and asks for privacy. “We hope they understand that as a family, we now want time, space and privacy while I finish my treatment,” she said, wringing her slender hands. A princess probably goes through the waiting rooms and receives a point of medical care that is inaccessible to most. But she can’t escape the intrusions and indignities of cancer: the worried waiting. For the pathological reports, the surprise of the news, the series of decisions about remedies that no young, healthy user would ever have to make. The remedy may seem like a grueling and protracted invasion.
And because Catherine is a princess, the rapes went further: the wild and unforgiving hypotheses about what was wrong with her body, the alleged unauthorized infiltrations into her medical records, which the London Clinic, where she underwent “major abdominal surgery,” is investigating. “There is no position in our hospital for those who deliberately abuse the acceptance as true of any of our patients or colleagues,” Al Russell, the clinic’s chief executive, said in a statement.
Even when it comes to health, intimacy is difficult for a public figure, and since marrying Prince William in 2011, Kate Middleton has been living under a microscope. His physical structure (his legs, his hair, his buttocks, his clothes) has changed. She has come under scrutiny like all female celebrities, but also for her role as royalty.
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