Breast Cancer

 

Anticipatory Grief

Anne Boyer’s book about surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying, takes the reader inside what it feels like to endure chemotherapy without any promise of surviving. Boyer covers a wide range of topics—the physical suffering, fears about dying, figuring out how to cope with pain, research into the medical treatments, the philosophy and history of breast cancer procedures, and the social inequalities of a for-profit health care system. 

Prostate Distillate

 

If you’re a man, you are likely to develop prostate cancer at some point. This will generally happen when you’re older/old, and in most cases, it will be so slow growing that you will die of something else before your prostate becomes a problem. That’s good news.

Grief of Dementia

We grieve when someone we love dies. We also grieve when a loved one is disappearing into dementia.

Leaving Tinkertown, written by Tanya Ward Goodman and published by the Univ. of New Mexico Press, is a brutally honest account of how a family fought against the incursions of Alzheimer’s, and their anguish at being unable to stop the disintegration. It’s also heartwarming to read because we see the family’s love for each other bringing them strength to endure when little else did.

Cooking with Grief

Everyone once in a while, a book on dealing with a life-threatening illness catches my attention because it deals with anticipatory grief. Recently it was Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, published this year by Milkweed Editions.