I apologise if this topic has been covered before, but if any doctors or medical students are watching, I'd like to know what kind of fatal illness can (a) strike at the age of 24; (b) can be diagnosed while the patient is still symptom-free; (c) allow the patient a peaceful and painless death while still looking as good as Ali McGraw. I know this is the movies, not life, but there should be some relationship, be it ever so tenuous, between the two.
shareIn the book she dies of leukemia....and as big of fan of the movie as I am I was always baffled why they never mentioned it in the movie and when the doctor tells Ryan she is dying...that he never replies with "what of"....and yes, Ali would have never looked that good in real life...but afterall, it's only a movie!
shareI also liked that she was on her deathbed and still cursing like normal. Silly movie but somehow it still kind of works.
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They never say its leaukemia, but the doctor talks about white blood cell counts and the like, so one can infer its leukemia.
"Christ, I miss the Cold War,"
- Casino Royale
It's really not spoiled- the first thing said in the movie is that she's dead.
"I have my orders from the Emperor himself, he's got something special planned for them."
First of all, the movie is 38 years old. Most people know she dies. And the first line of dialogue is "What can you say about a girl who was 25 and died?" Not exactly a spoiler.
shareLeukemia. In "Oliver's Story" (the sequel) he says she died from leukemia.
Most likely leukemia, which can develop without symptoms & the person's health can deteriorate very quickly.
shareAcute Pedanticalness.
shareyeah, well, I asked my mom the same question when I saw it, I figured since it came out while she was in college whe would know. She said it was leukemia.
shareThis may be a stupid question, but did they not have chemo then? Or is that what she opted not to take?
share"This may be a stupid question, but did they not have chemo then? Or is that what she opted not to take?"
In that day and time, there was very little they could do for leukemia. What they could do rarely worked.
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They had it, but not like they do now. Treatment has improved tremendously since then
sharePerhaps you are not aware of the fact that various forms of cancer, including leukemia, strike at all ages (including children -- hence the medical field of pediatric oncology) and there are forms of leukemia that we still can't treat effectively today, much less forty years ago...
Yes, Jenny has a form of leukemia -- a "blood" cancer.
Definitely true that still today, leukemia can be fatal and death can be quick. A relative of mine was in her 40's when she contracted it about 7 years ago. At Thanksgiving, she said she was tired, but no one, including her, had any idea she was seriously ill. A couple of weeks later she was diagnosed with an aggressive, terminal leukemia. She decided to opt out of treatment and was gone within a few months.
shareLook up Adam Darski from the the Polish metal band Behemoth. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010 and things didn't look good for him. However, the hospital at Gdansk where he was receiving treatment was able to find a bone marrow donor who was a match and Darski ultimately "beat" the disease with a transplant. He did receive adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
(Side note...Darski is very much like Aleister Crowley in his intellect and philosophies)
Medical science has come a long way in 40 years when it comes to certain illnesses.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RIP Lemmy Kilmister: "Born to lose, lived to win."
hah!
shareor eating regularly in the Radcliffe dining hall.
"I'm not reckless . . . I'm skillful!"
Leukemia was still untreated in 1969-1970... Eric Lund had leukemia in 1968 (in real life) and he was a guinea pig for platelets and different tests.. by 1972, at the time he passed, the doctors found new, more modern ways to treat the disease. Read "Eric" by Doris Lund. Good book.
shareIn 1967 I came down with mono - but they first thought it was leukemia. Have discussed with my parents who for 24 hours were sure that I would die. At that time leukemia (especially juvenile) was pretty much fatal.
Fortunately great strides have been made since then.
yes, great point. Also, the op seems not to realize that children die from forms of cancer every day (nobody under 25 dies of a terminal illness??) In those days, considering that her leukemia was advanced when they caught it and there were few treatments available, she would not have had chemo, hence the fact that she does not lose her hair or otherwise look "bad."
shareIts been a while since I read the book (like, 7 years or so) but I thought in the book it says she tries some treatments but didn't like the way they made her feel so she stopped them. It was all quick though, maybe only 2 weeks of treatment before she called it quits.
In the movie they don't say anything. I asked my mom why they didn't say she had leukemia in the movie (my mom was a teen when it came out) and she said they "just didn't do that then" and "everyone knew because the book was such a hit".
>>> the op seems not to realize that children die from forms of cancer every day (nobody under 25 dies of a terminal illness??)
You didn't read the OP very carefully.
I cried because I had no shoes üntil I met a man with no sole. ~ Ancient Disco Proverb
Whatever cable channel used to do that "Dinner & a Movie" thing was showing Sweet November a couple years ago. Right before they cut to the people in the studio, who are making dinner and talking about the movie, there's the scene where Keanu Reeves opens Charlize Theron's kitchen cabinet, and there's all this medicine in it. And Charlize looks, well, like Charlize Theron, i.e., gorgeous. When they cut to commercial, or rather, the Dinner and a Movie people, one of them says, "Uh oh. It looks like Charlize has Movie Cancer."
shareI do dislike the way cancer is glamourized in movies. However, Dying Young with Julia Roberts and Campbell Scott was done very well! He had leukemia as well.
Interesting side note: Ryan O'Neal has been suffering from Leukemia for quite some time now, but is in remission.
I remember when Forrest Gump came out in the theaters and it showed Robin Wright's character Jenny in bed, talking with Forrest about being sick. Then it showed her grave under the tree. I was a bit confused on what she had, and so I asked my sister after the movie finished. "What did Jenny die of?"
My sister said (like duhhh on her face), "AIDS."
I wasn't utterly convinced because I witnessed my neighbor with daily AIDS symptoms and dying the year before the movie came out. It was a horrible way to die in the early 90s. So Jenny died in 1982 and AIDS was even more cruel to people's immune system back then.
"Movie Cancer" like the other poster said.. it leaves things unrealistic. The Forrest Gump book was more descriptive, however, Jenny was already married and got AIDS through needles when she died.
Actually, a close relative of mine died of leukemia and the treatment was very similar to Ali's character in Love Story. It was going to be terminal - they could have 9 months in agony from chemo and then die, or very quickly with very little treatment at all. They decided against chemo - like Jenny - and so got pumped full of vitamins that made them look really good, people didn't think they were dying and arranged to meet up with them later on, but they died really quickly, literally they just asked for a stay in hospital and then died. I had no idea when I started watching this on tv one day that it would be about leukemia and watching it brought it all back, it was incredibly upsetting actually. People in those days didn't really talk about cancer, so it isn't so spelt out, but it is quite accurate apart from that.
shareIn leukemia and other blood cancers were very hard to treat. Survival rates were so small you couldn't even fill a bus station with the number of long term survivors.
In those days people were hestitant to say the word Cancer. It was called the Big C or people whispered it in hushed tones. This was driven more by fear and less by shame and humiliation. There was nothing wrong with having cancer. What made it depressing in those days was an otherwise healthy person just like you could be diagnosed with cancer just like you. It was scary times. It was very sad in those days to hear about or know people in the prime of life struck down by an illness that could not be treated.
Things startd to change in the 1980's. When I was in high school there were two cancer kids in our school and one died. This was very sad. But they were never told from day one it was a lost cause and modern medicine could do zero for them. They two had a chance to fight it which is far better than being told there is nothing that can be done. That setup had a way of elevating the moods of others and prompting people to rally around and be supportive.
Yes, because most people's experience of cancer is messy, painful chemo and a slow disintegration of a person they tend to criticize this film. It is an accurate representation of what treatment for leukemia could be like at that time though - almost no physical clues the person was dying, literally there one day and gone the next.
shareI've known a lot of people who have died of AIDS and you would be surprised, some go very quickly. The first friend I ever had who died I ran into at Halloween and he had the sniffles. I asked him is he was coming down with something. He tells me he has had a cold for about a week. I didn't think much of it at the time.
The next week, he fell very ill and was hospitalized. At that point, he was diagnosed as having AIDS. He was dead by the end of the week. He was 26 years old.
In the early 70's leukemia was as much a death sentence as AIDS was in the early days before the great treatments they have now. It was considered one of the most aggressive, and untreatable cancers. Fortunately, many people survive it now.
"He'd kill us if he got the chance."
--The Conversation
You know, I never thought about Ryan's having leukemia and his "wife" having it in the movie. I'm sure it doesn't occur to Ryan (the actor), he probably hasn't seen the movie himself in years.
When Farrah died, all I could think of was her dying in Ryan's arms like Jennifer did in the movie.
Both would be totally surreal. I thought art was supposed to imitate life, not the other way around.
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Worst part of the movie for me was that she got better looking every minute up until she died. I'd just lost an aunt to cancer, and believe me, it was miserable. I never enojoyed the film. It's in the news again because of the Paramount anniversary. Maybe I'll try again.
shareShe died of what has since been called (no joke) "Ali McGraw's Disease." This is a disease that only movie characters can contract. It's a fatal disease that has no name, no symptoms, and no indications other than that the character become more and more beautiful as the death scene approaches.
Seriously, I'm not making this term up. Thanks to "Love Story," "Ali MacGraw's Disease" has become a term for the cliche of a character who dies of an unnamed disease just to give the character a great death scene.
Ali McGraw's disease silly....
From Ebert's glossary:
"Ali MacGraw's Disease
Movie illness in which the only symptom is that the sufferer grows more beautiful as death approaches. (This disease claimed many screen victims, often including Greta Garbo.)"