CancerLand Bookshelf: When My World Was Very Small: a memoir of family, food, cancer and my couch

Posted December 7th, 2011

How’s it going?” I ask the teenager sitting across from me. I choose my words carefully before speaking them aloud. Consciously avoid saying how are you? Or worse, how are you feeling?

CancerLand Bookshelf: The Summer of Her Baldness

Posted December 30th, 2010

Twelve years later and not much has changed. Not much. Not really. Starting with the entrance. He knocks twice, opens the door and hurriedly strides into the examining room. His energy speaks volumes (Places to go; patients to see. So many patients; so little time. ). I am sitting there, a veteran oncology patient, waiting […]

CancerLand Bookshelf: Her Doctor Prescribes Dancing at Daybreak

Posted November 16th, 2010

I hate patient intake forms, don’t you? Here’s what bothers me: Typically, these forms are delivered to us attached to a clipboard, by a harried front desk person who is busy juggling incoming phone calls and insurance co-pays. These forms have way too many spaces to be filled in. Empty places for the basics: name, […]

CancerLand Bookshelf: Songs from a Lead-Lined Room

Posted November 5th, 2010

Memoirs lined up on the CancerLand Bookshelf are often filled with powerful life lessons, painstakingly learned on the long journey to recovery. Last week, almost twelve years to the day after my own cancer diagnosis, I faced up to a daunting challenge that helped me finally make peace with my biggest cancer-related loss to date. […]

CancerLand Bookshelf: The Cancer Monologue Project

Posted July 26th, 2010

After my first cancer surgery, I woke up hungry. Ravenously hungry. Give-me-something-to-eat-now-or-else hungry. The way my stomach was growling, you would think that I had been fasting for weeks, and not just since midnight the night before being admitted to the hospital. But now it was after 5 pm, I was out of recovery and […]

CancerLand Bookshelf: My One-Night Stand with Cancer

Posted July 8th, 2010

The CancerLand journey is made up of moments.  Strange moments.  Defining moments. Once-in-a-lifetime types of encounters, often intensely traumatic experiences that mark and change you:  physically, emotionally, spiritually.  Forever it seems. Ask any cancer survivor.  Some will say it’s the moment of diagnosis – the day that a doctor says those life-changing words, I’m sorry, […]

CancerLand Bookshelf: Bald in the Land of Big Hair

Posted June 21st, 2010

It was the late, great Art Linkletter who coined the phrase, Kids Say the Darndest Things to describe the uncensored and often very funny comments that fly out of kids’ mouths. Well, I’d like to borrow those famous words and edit them ever so slightly to read, People Say the Darndest Things to Cancer Survivors. […]

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, […]

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 […]