Dealing with cancer is a frightening challenge, whether you have contracted this disease yourself or if you know friends or family who are afflicted. As a cancer combatant myself (now seven years in remission), I have found the books below to be helpful in understanding and dealing with cancer, the doctors, nurses, and medical procedures, and other experiences faced during the patient's fight for survival.
There is some comfort in this understanding. I wish you well on your journey.
Happy reading.
Because Cowards Get Cancer Too: A Hypochondriac Confronts His Nemesis - John Diamond
Description:
Already in the first sentences, journalist Diamond shows his self-deprecating wit, intelligence, and sardonic nature, setting the tone for the book. After his throat cancer diagnosis, Diamond decided to share his encounters with the medical world and his personal relationships in his internationally-circulated column. Diamond talks about the confusion of treatment, dealing with good/bad/indifferent doctors, reassuring friends, and recognizing himself as just another patient rather than a hero for his battles.
Witty, smart, penetrating, and insightful, this opening of the real world of the cancer experience, from humorous to fearful, is not to be missed.
Mortality - Christopher Hitchens
Description:
In 2010, internationally famous social critic and journalist Hitchens contracted esophageal cancer and was dead in eighteen months. During that time of illness, he continued to write articles for Vanity Fair (collected into this book) about his illness, his thoughts of treatment, his changing outlook on the world, and death. An avowed atheist, he adamantly refused to change his religious feelings despite his pain and fatal prognosis. Highly intelligent, deeply philosophical, and always personal, Mortality is a serious, honest, and deeply-felt memoir of one thoughtful, intelligent man's cancer experience.
Description:
Extremely thorough history of cancer, from its first appearance in ancient Egypt writings to modern discoveries. Mukherjee documents cases and treatments ranging from early primitive attempts to understand and remove cancers to current drug cocktails and focused genetic treatments. A very readable, fascinating, and learned compilation of the history, people, and medical fights against all forms of cancer.
Description:
Author Paul Kalanithi is a budding superstar in neurosurgery. But while finishing his last year of residency, he contracts lung cancer. In this memoir, he carefully documents his rise in the medical profession, his interest in the brain, his cancer self-diagnosis, and his life as a patient in the same hospital where he operated on others with cancer. A riveting account, very intelligently written, conveying his passion and drive during his medical training and then his battle with cancer.
Sensitively written, Alice and Oliver also reveal challenges faced to their relationship, their coping mechanisms, and their struggles to find the strength and will to carry on. Extremely moving and thorough in its revelations about the personal and medical world of cancer treatment.
There is some comfort in this understanding. I wish you well on your journey.
Happy reading.
_______________________
First Sentences
In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities, hypochondria has always seemed to me to be the only rational position to take in life.
Consider, by the time you hit 40, your tattered heart has already thumped out a billion and a half beats; what can the chances be of any organ doing anything a billion and a half times and never making a mistake?
Description:
Already in the first sentences, journalist Diamond shows his self-deprecating wit, intelligence, and sardonic nature, setting the tone for the book. After his throat cancer diagnosis, Diamond decided to share his encounters with the medical world and his personal relationships in his internationally-circulated column. Diamond talks about the confusion of treatment, dealing with good/bad/indifferent doctors, reassuring friends, and recognizing himself as just another patient rather than a hero for his battles.
Witty, smart, penetrating, and insightful, this opening of the real world of the cancer experience, from humorous to fearful, is not to be missed.
I wasn't doing this [writing] for the greater good of cancer patients everywhere....I was doing it as a form of very public denial therapy....I was trying to change the problem from one of pain and physical constraint and possibly impending death into one of best journalistic practise....unconscious of the times when I was putting a jaunty spin on something depressing, of the times when I was feigning bravery or indifference.
_______________________
First Sentences
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.
But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.
Description:
In 2010, internationally famous social critic and journalist Hitchens contracted esophageal cancer and was dead in eighteen months. During that time of illness, he continued to write articles for Vanity Fair (collected into this book) about his illness, his thoughts of treatment, his changing outlook on the world, and death. An avowed atheist, he adamantly refused to change his religious feelings despite his pain and fatal prognosis. Highly intelligent, deeply philosophical, and always personal, Mortality is a serious, honest, and deeply-felt memoir of one thoughtful, intelligent man's cancer experience.
_______________________
End of Your Life Book Club - Will Schwalbe
First Sentences
We were nuts about the mocha in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's outpatient care center.
Description:
While sitting in hospital waiting rooms killing time before cancer treatments for his mother, Mary Anne, author Will Schwalbe and she talk about books they have read. They form a book club of sorts, with only themselves as members, discussing agreed-upon titles and recollecting their past lives together and apart. Their relationship strengthens with each week and book. A very moving memoir of two intelligent, sympathetic, funny people. As a bonus, their discussions reveal plenty of great book titles to pursue.
_______________________
First Sentences
I stand with my hand on the receiver.
I want to call my friend who has just been diagnosed with lupus, but my mind has reverted to that of a seven-year-old, and an inner tape plays, "What am I going to say? How am I going to say it?
.
Description:
When someone close to you contracts cancer, it is often difficult to know the best tone to use to interact with that person. Friendly? Joking? Serious? Inquiring? The Etiquette of Illness is a straightforward guide to dealing with every sort of encounter and uncertainty you might face. Author Halpern, a counselor to friends and family of cancer patients, shares her insights and recommendations, drawing on what patients have told her about what encourages successful communication with friends and what pitfalls to avoid.
A highly valuable tool that you will refer to often when uncertain of how best to communicate with the people you love and want to help in their struggle with cancer.
A highly valuable tool that you will refer to often when uncertain of how best to communicate with the people you love and want to help in their struggle with cancer.
_______________________
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
First Sentences
On the morning of May 19, 2004, Karla Reid, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache.
Description:
Extremely thorough history of cancer, from its first appearance in ancient Egypt writings to modern discoveries. Mukherjee documents cases and treatments ranging from early primitive attempts to understand and remove cancers to current drug cocktails and focused genetic treatments. A very readable, fascinating, and learned compilation of the history, people, and medical fights against all forms of cancer.
_______________________
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
First Sentences
I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated....But this scan was different: it was my own.
Description:
Author Paul Kalanithi is a budding superstar in neurosurgery. But while finishing his last year of residency, he contracts lung cancer. In this memoir, he carefully documents his rise in the medical profession, his interest in the brain, his cancer self-diagnosis, and his life as a patient in the same hospital where he operated on others with cancer. A riveting account, very intelligently written, conveying his passion and drive during his medical training and then his battle with cancer.
Severe illness wasn't life-altering. It was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany -- a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters -- and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward....
[The] cancer diagnosis was like a nutcracker, getting us back into the soft, nourishing meat of our marriage. We hung on to each other for [my] physical survival and our emotional survival, our love stripped bare. We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love --- to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.
_______________________
First Sentences
There she was, Alice Culvert, a little taller than most, her figure fuller than she would have liked.
This brisk morning, the fourth Wednesday of November, Alice was making her way down West Thirteenth. Her infant was strapped to her chest; her backpack was overloaded and pulling at her shoulders. The Buddhist skull beads around her wrist kept a rattling time.
Description:
In this novel Alice and Oliver are a young couple with an infant daughter. When Alice discovers she had leukemia and must be hospitalized, the book reveals the trials and fears experienced by the couple, their family, and their friends. Taking place in the early 1990s, the treatments of pills, ports, radiation, stem cell transplant, and diet are more frightening and difficult than those I experienced. But her uncertainties and her drive to fight the disease and overcome the obstacles are familiar to anyone who has been through such a battle whether personally or with friends or family.
Sensitively written, Alice and Oliver also reveal challenges faced to their relationship, their coping mechanisms, and their struggles to find the strength and will to carry on. Extremely moving and thorough in its revelations about the personal and medical world of cancer treatment.
Inside the house that was her body, it was as if she were walking out of every room and turning off the lights behind her, one by one...
"So easy to be positive when you aren't feeling horrendous," Alice whispered. "The pain melts all of it...."
This is what people go through. Now is my turn.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add a comment or book recommendation.