Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal PDF Download

Author: Susan Gubar
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039324699X
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
An important addition to the literature of cancer by an award-winning scholar and memoirist. Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs. To stimulate the writing process, she proposes specific exercises, prompts, and models. In discussions of the diary of Fanny Burney, the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, numerous memoirs, novels, paintings, photographs, and blogs, Gubar shows how readers can learn from art that deepens our comprehension of what it means to live or die with the disease. From a writer whose own memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “moving and instructive…and incredibly brave,” this volume opens a path to healing.

Author: Myra Schneider
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1843101130
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2000, poet and author Myra Schneider turned to her writing to help her come to terms with the experience. In this thoughtful and readable book, she illustrates how writing helped her through diagnosis, treatment and recovery as well as the change in self-image following her mastectomy.

Author: Sandra Marinella
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608684849
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal. She also shares her own experience of using journaling and expressive writing to navigate challenges including breast cancer and postpartum depression. Each of the techniques, prompts, and exercises she presents helps us “to unravel the knot inside and to make sense of loss.”

Author: Jay Perry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781980819721
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Most of us, at one time or another, have encountered tragedy.If you find yourself reading the description of this book, I assume this is the case for you and I'd like to say I'm truly sorry. To be honest, I really wish everything in this book were tales of fiction and that my experiences were all a dream. But the stories I courageously share, are my own truthful encounters with life as a caregiver.This book is an outline of my experiences while taking care of my dad, both physically and mentally, during his battle with cancer. It is a tool designed to help those in similar positions navigate coping, self-awareness, empathy, compassion, self-care, support, education, commitment, grief, love and embracing the day-to-day reality of caregiving. Although very cancer-specific, these words can provide encouragement to all those questioning whether or not to take on the role of caregiver. I did my best to write the book I was looking for when my journey began in early 2013. I don't have any 'top 10' pieces of advice to offer, and any advice I do give is solely based off what was found to work successfully for my dad. I'm not a doctor, and I don't have any professional medical training whatsoever. At the time this story began I was just a son doing everything possible for my best friend - I educated myself on the run. My dad was given a terminal diagnosis of nine months to a year to live. He ended up passing away two and a half years later, and although he fought hard for us, I want my dad's fight to be worth more. I want his struggles to give inspiration, and I want to see a shy, humble man's battle provide support and hope long after he's gone. I share these stories about a man with an incurable disease to demonstrate how myself and my loved ones were able to extend his life beyond what doctors ever expected. During my dad's final year, I used social media as a positive platform to share the daily struggles and absolute joys I was constantly faced with. The outpouring of love and support I received is what made me realize this book needed to be written.For obvious reasons, I hate the fact that this book has grounds to exist, but I will use it as a vehicle to share a journey that will hopefully help you with yours.*Description taken from Chapter One: To The Reader

Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 9781594741159
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A fun and practical guide on how to write the next chick lit bestseller—with expert writing advice from Meg Cabot, Emily Giffin, and Sophie Kinsella With chick lit novels popping up on every bestseller list, millions of readers are all thinking the same thing: I could write this stuff. I could write a bestseller and never go back to the office again! And here’s the guide that will show you how. Bestselling novelist Sarah Mlynowski and veteran chick lit editor Farrin Jacobs cover every stage of developing and selling your soon-to-be bestselling novel, with information on • developing an idea • learning the basics of plotting • deciding on a point of view • pacing, and conflict • making your characters likable • finding an agent —and much more, including humorous tips and advice from scores of established writers (from Meg Cabot and Marian Keyes to Emily Giffin and Sophie Kinsella). If you’ve got stories to tell, See Jane Write will take care of the rest.

Author: Anita Moorjani
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401937527
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "I had the choice to come back ... or not. I chose to return when I realized that 'heaven' is a state, not a place" In this truly inspirational memoir, Anita Moorjani relates how, after fighting cancer for almost four years, her body began shutting down—overwhelmed by the malignant cells spreading throughout her system. As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth . . . and the actual cause of her disease. Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was released from the hospital within weeks—without a trace of cancer in her body! Within this enhanced e-book, Anita recounts—in words and on video—stories of her childhood in Hong Kong, her challenge to establish her career and find true love, as well as how she eventually ended up in that hospital bed where she defied all medical knowledge. In "Dying to Be Me," Anita Freely shares all she has learned about illness, healing, fear, "being love," and the true magnificence of each and every human being!

Author: Yvonne Ortega
Publisher: Fleming H. Revell Company
ISBN: 9780800731861
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Cancer touches nearly everyone, whether firsthand or through the life of a loved one. Counselor and teacher Yvonne Ortega discovered this when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and began her journey to recovery. In Hope for the Journey through Cancer, she shares with readers her personal triumphs and setbacks with humor and refreshing candor, always reminding us of God's desire to meet us exactly where we are. These sixty devotions are divided into sections--diagnosis, surgery, treatment, and recovery--each incorporating Scripture into daily life. Ortega's attention to even the most basic hopes and fears that a cancer patient faces each day offers encouragement that can come only from one who has been there herself.

Author: Anne Boyer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374719489
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION "The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." —Sally Rooney, author of Normal People "Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations

Author: Stephen Graham King
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595375308
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
In the year 2000, Stephen Graham King was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer known as synovial sarcoma, beginning a four-year ordeal of radiation, chemotherapy, physiotherapy, and multiple recurrences. After having trouble with his left knee for much of his adult life, King finally saw a doctor following a bump to the leg that almost made him pass out from the excruciating pain. After the diagnosis, he endured five major, invasive surgeries that cost him a large portion of his left leg and half of his left lung, radically changing his body, mind, and self-image forever. And in the end, forcing him to relearn many things: some as basic as re-learning how to walk. As a gay man who is part of an image-conscious subculture within our image-driven society, he was forced to confront his feelings about his body on the long road back to health. Now, in Just Breathe, King shares his journey from health to illness and back to health again through prose and journal entries written during the battle. Told with candour and humour, this is the story of his challenging recovery and the love of life, friends, and family that helped him to survive.

Author: George Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385349718
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way—an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease. Deftly excavating and illuminating decades of investigation and analysis, he reveals what we know and don’t know about cancer, showing why a cure remains such a slippery concept. We follow him as he combs through the realms of epidemiology, clinical trials, laboratory experiments, and scientific hypotheses—rooted in every discipline from evolutionary biology to game theory and physics. Cogently extracting fact from a towering canon of myth and hype, he describes tumors that evolve like alien creatures inside the body, paleo-oncologists who uncover petrified tumors clinging to the skeletons of dinosaurs and ancient human ancestors, and the surprising reversals in science’s comprehension of the causes of cancer, with the foods we eat and environmental toxins playing a lesser role. Perhaps most fascinating of all is how cancer borrows natural processes involved in the healing of a wound or the unfolding of a human embryo and turns them, jujitsu-like, against the body. Throughout his pursuit, Johnson clarifies the human experience of cancer with elegiac grace, bearing witness to the punishing gauntlet of consultations, surgeries, targeted therapies, and other treatments. He finds compassion, solace, and community among a vast network of patients and professionals committed to the fight and wrestles to comprehend the cruel randomness cancer metes out in his own family. For anyone whose life has been affected by cancer and has found themselves asking why?, this book provides a new understanding. In good company with the works of Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese, The Cancer Chronicles is endlessly surprising and as radiant in its prose as it is authoritative in its eye-opening science.