Last week, I watched actress Emma Thompson portray with real power a life derailed by cancer in the 2001 HBO screen adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Wit by Margaret Edson.

I watched the movie, on DVD and in the privacy of my own home, almost six years after it was released -- and two years after my own cancer derailment. I like the order in which it all happened -- having cancer and then watching the movie, rather than watching the movie and then having cancer.

Thompson's portrayal of Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., professor of 17th-century English poetry, and expert on the sonnets of John Donne, was entirely real -- so real I sometimes felt I was reliving my own journey with cancer.

The cold, impersonal delivery of Bearing's treatment plan -- eight high-dose, experimental chemotherapy treatments taken over the course of eight months for stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, an aggressive and advanced form -- reminded me of the matter-of-fact manner in which doctors speak to patients, the manner in which my own oncologist spoke to me, void of compassion and warmth and concern.

The on-going sterile and clinical interactions Bearing encounters from doctors, technicians, nurses, and medical students allowed me to appreciate the very few caring souls who crossed my medical path.

Bearing resolves to become a scholar on cancer, just as she has on Donne. And while I am no Ph.D. scholar, I did study cancer, sometimes to a fault, in order to acquire some sort of control over what was happening to me.

Chemotherapy makes Bearing sick. It made me sick too. Chemotherapy lands Bearing in hospital isolation. It landed me there too. Cancer scares Bearing. It scared me too.

Sometimes, cancer -- the return of cancer -- still scares me. But mostly, I am happy to be alive, happy to be watching movies that authentically capture the reality of cancer, movies that make me proud to have overcome what Bearing's doctor calls an insidious disease.

Photographer Sharon Seligman's images are inspired by her personal journeys. She photographs people and birds and residential communities. She also captures the journeys of women enduring breast cancer. Her work speaks of the human experience. It speaks of her own experience. It speaks volumes.

Bearing Witness: Beyond the Surface of Breast Cancer is one of Seligman's portfolios. It's a photographic trip down memory lane, depicting self-portraits of courageous breast cancer survivors. Seligman tells her own story in words that border the left side of each portrait. Captions to the right of each black and white photograph offer a glimpse into the life of each woman whose being is displayed in raw form, for all to see, for all to contemplate, for all to appreciate.

And then in another portfolio, Seligman offers more photographs, more visions of the breast cancer experience.

Seligman aims to share the physical changes that come from breast cancer, to project the inner truths. Clearly, she is right on target.

I like this doctor! At the 2006 Magnolia Tea, the keynote speaker was Dr. William Rayburn. He spoke to 60 women who attended the luncheon, and when I read what he had to say, I wished he had been talking to 600 thousand women. Dr. Rayburn started out by telling the women, that despite all the emerging medical knowledge, it is important for women to listen to their own bodies and to pay attention to anything that does not seem normal. He said the longer he has been in practice, the more he has realized how little he knows compared to how much women know about themselves. "Trust your instincts," the doctor said. Thumbs up for this doctor!

He also challenges some of ways the media explains research findings to the public, and specifically, the study findings of the Women's Health Initiative, WHI, a long-term national health study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. I have questioned some of their findings. Contrary to the WHI stating that diet and exercise do not have an impact on health, Dr. Rayburn believes diet and exercise indeed have a positive affect on health. Of course it does -- what you eat and how much you move is going to make a difference -- it's common sense. You can read more about what the good doctor had to say in the feature Doctor tells women to trust their instincts.