The CancerLand Bookshelf: Mom’s Marijuana

Posted May 20th, 2010

Sometimes the perfect book appears precisely at the moment when you need it the most. (I just love when that happens). Such was the case with Dan Shapiro’s amazing cancer memoir Mom’s Marijuana. I read the book while recuperating from reconstruction surgery that unfortunately stretched into an eight-day hospital stay due to post-operative complications. Unfortunate, […]


What Binds Us, Doesn’t Hold Us Together

Posted May 13th, 2010

I work for a legal aid organization in Philadelphia, the Legal Clinic for the Disabled, Inc., as a staff attorney.  Many of those I help either are being treated for cancer, or have been treated for it in the past. One of the things that has struck me in the two plus years of working […]


The CancerLand Bookshelf: My Tree Called Life

Posted May 9th, 2010

Early May and I’m in the backyard, digging up weeds in the garden. And as I dig around the lilies (still leafing), and the irises (already in bloom: pale yellow, ghostly white and deep purple), I think back five years ago to when this rectangular patch of earth was waist-high in weeds: tall, green exceptionally […]


The CancerLand Bookshelf: Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

Posted May 5th, 2010

Radiation. Crazy time. I thought I had forgotten those seven weeks. But reading Mary Cappello’s cancer memoir stirs up some distant radiation memories that are now playing back in my head like a rerun of some bad Lifetime movie. To fill in some of the missing pieces, I dig out my journal from 1999, read […]


The CancerLand Bookshelf: Not Done Yet: Living Through Breast Cancer

Posted May 2nd, 2010

She was a great nodder: a person sitting in the audience smiling and nodding her head while I was speaking. I love great nodders. When I stand in front of a room full of people leading a workshop, I’m always on the lookout for them. Once the session begins, I scan the room and the […]