Prissy Elrod

The large number of positive reviews on Amazon influenced me to read this memoir of the tragic death of the author’s first husband, Boone, at the age of fifty-one from brain cancer. It details the ordeal suffered by the wife, Prissy Elrod, during the approximate year from diagnosis to death.

There are several things that I didn’t realize before I read “Far Outside the Ordinary.” This is Elrod’s first book and is, basically, self-published through her own publishing house called Leather Leaf Publishing. It is not simply a memoir of the death of her husband. It is written like chick-lit. You learn that Prissy is putting on bronze lipstick. She cries in the arms of her black nanny. She cries in the arms of the man she just hired to care for her sick husband. There is a lot of crying.

More importantly, the last 72 out of 254 pages are about the romance between Prissy and her second husband, largely through AOL (“you’ve got mail”) email. The cute exchange of messages ultimately leading to their union was not what I expected in this memoir, nor did it interest me. Typical of the prose was Prissy’s phone call to her girlfriend to help her decide whether she should meet her intended wearing black pants and top or a brown and yellow sun dress.

Prissy’s story is told from the perspective of extremely wealthy people. Both Prissy and Boone seemed to have enjoyed extremely affluent backgrounds. For example, in the summers of her youth Prissy spent the month of July at the Cloister, a venerable resort on Sea Island, with her Mother, sisters and black nanny. Prissy’s mother commissioned an artist to paint old-world-style portraits of Prissy and her sister, so Prissy did the same for her daughters. On Prissy’s first date with Boone, he took her to his grandmother’s winter home, Waverly Plantation, where he lived alone while attending law school.

The family continued to have significant financial resources. Prior to Boone’s illness, Prissy was not working, had two children (one 19 and the other 16 years old) and relied on a housekeeper two days a week. The family had a beach house on St. Teresa Island, on the Gulf of Mexico. One of Boone’s hobbies was large game hunting. Annually, he and his friends paid a lot of money to hunt “some of the finest bull elk, cow elk, bear and wild birds in North America” on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, with the associated taxidermy. When Prissy realized that wheelchair-bound Boone should have time outside, she didn’t build a ramp but had a deck built on the rear of the house so he could be rolled outside.

Prissy is a physician’s daughter, yet she made illogical decisions. When Boone was initially diagnosed with brain cancer, she found a medical center and outstanding surgeon from the latest recommendations of U.S. News and World Report, yet she paid $900 for a Chinese foot soak treatment guaranteed to travel from his feet to his brain, where it would miraculously dissolve the lethal tumor.

She and Boone moved from their home in Tallahassee, Florida, to Houston for several weeks to get controversial, unproven, alternative medicine treatment at the clinic of Stanislaw Burzynski, touted as able to cure inoperable brain tumors. According to Prissy, the government spent years “suppressing” this cancer treatment and trying to “put this pioneer scientist and inventor in jail.” According to Prissy, “Burzynski was indicted for fraud and seventy-five counts of violating laws; some of these events were taking place at the time we needed him.”

The initial fee for treatment at the Burzynski Clinic was $10,000 with an additional “$7,000 to $9,500" per month, according to the American Cancer Society. In short, Prissy became responsible for administering the treatments ordered by the Burzynski Clinic, which became a painful ordeal for Boone as the weeks passed and his condition worsened.

Prissy hired the following caregivers for Boone: a black man named “Du,” his “sister” Sallie, and Willie, a substitute black man who, according to Du, occasionally volunteered at Du’s church. Prior to their hiring, Betty, the housekeeper, helped Prissy care for Boone.

Du and his alleged sister were compassionate, experienced caregivers, and good with Boone, but no mention was made of any training. They both moved into the house and Prissy became dependent on them and involved in their lives. Du's “sister” turned out to be his girlfriend. Du’s mother because terminally ill and was admitted to the hospital, and Willie was actually a homeless alcoholic and drug addict (he seemed stoned when Prissy found his on the street) who lived in a shelter. Prissy helped Du divorce his wife, helped Sallie when her son was arrested and jailed and generally tried to solve their problems because she relied on them to care for Boone. Du recruited Willie from the homeless shelter when Prissy felt that she was “living on the set of some B-list soap opera.”

One might wonder why Prissy, an educated person of means, did not hire a trained, experienced caregiver, perhaps from an agency, to care for Boone. Maybe qualifications were not relevant for Prissy, since, following Boone’s death, she did get a job as a legal secretary to the deputy general counsel to the governor of Florida based on her connections but with absolutely no training or experience.

Some of the reviews mentioned that they laughed at parts of this memoir. However, any humor escaped me.… (mehr)