Memoir, cultural history and bleak humour characterise this brilliant personal exploration of health anxiety
Caroline Crampton was 17 and midway through her A-levels when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare form of blood cancer. When the diagnosis was delivered in the consultant’s office, her mother fainted, quietly sliding off her chair and on to the floor. After months of gruelling treatment, Crampton was given the all-clear and went to university as planned. But in her first year, she found a lump on her neck that turned out to be a tumour. Crampton had further chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, which was followed by weeks in an isolation ward and a period of close monitoring. At 22, she was declared cancer-free, and, five years later, had her last check-up. By then, she was told, she had no more chance of getting cancer than the rest of the population.
What those check-ups didn’t address was the anxiety that had embedded itself in her psyche and has tormented her since her first diagnosis, leading her to visit her doctor with imagined conditions, or simply to stare, panicked, in the mirror while feeling around her skin for nonexistent lumps. “You are allowed to think it. I can hear you thinking it,” Crampton notes at the start of A Body Made of Glass. “I am a hypochondriac. Or, at least, I worry that I am, which really amounts to the same thing.”
