In the last chapter of The Sickbed, Boyer quotes Bertolt Brecht, who states “the truth… must be written for someone, someone who can do something with it,”(133-4) To me, this encapsulates Boyer’s purpose in writing her memoir. This is the reason she tells not only her story but the story of objectification in the cancer industry, how breast cancer is gendered (accompanied with phrases such as “Attitude is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor”(165), and the immoral practices of doctors and our healthcare system profiting off of disease. One thing that I noticed was the reiterated idea that we refuse to accept that our world is the reason that these diseases have expressed themselves in the way and prevalence that they have. Statements like half of people will get cancer is less outrageous if we believe it all comes from ourselves and do not think about the effects our environment have on our body. Boyer’s conversation to her daughter broke me a little, when she tries to reassure her daughter that she has a lower chance of breast cancer because she does not have the hereditary BRCA gene, but her daughter comments that instead of being genetically cursed, she is cursed “of living in the world that made you sick,”(131) Something that we have been trained to think is out of our control is not. I am reminded of the idea that a patient displaying “any potential for agency” is to “cease compliance” (65), where questioning the way that things have operated, even when there is no real way to know if treatments will work with certainty. Agency is framed as this horrible thing that will shorten your lifetime if wielded, but we should know that this is not the case.