Between Two Kingdoms

A Memoir of Interrupted Life
by Suleika Jaouad

In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing to enter "the real world". She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

 

It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like 1,000 invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: acute myelogenous leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next three years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

 

This is an extraordinary book.  You should need no more inducements to read it. (I listened to the book on Audible.com.  It is read by the author who does an amazing job!).

Also, see the TED Talk...

My Own Medicine (2002)

A Doctor's Life as a Patient 
by Geoffrey Kurland
Overview from Google Books: From mortal illness to miraculous recovery, a doctor's moving account of his own experience as a patient At forty-two, Geoffrey Kurland, a pediatric pulmonologist specializing in such deadly diseases as cystic fibrosis, was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia, a rare cancer with a statistically low survival rate. A remarkably fit man in training for 100-mile "extreme" races whose job is equally high performance, he is forced to confront the challenge of his own mortality. He tries to cope by turning inward in a desperate search for ever-elusive answers. As the doctor becomes a patient and lives through the terror and pain that he had until then only observed at a remove in his young patients, he learns invaluable life lessons that will ultimately make him a better doctor. This is Kurland's memoir of his diagnosis, treatment, and return to health and "normal" life-an unforgettable testament to the resilence of the human spirit.

There is also an amazing talk about the book which Geoffrey Kurland gave at Chautauqua in 2004.  My Own Medicine: Lessons Learned en Route to Recovery.  I found it at my local library.

Time on Fire by Evan Handler

My Comedy of Terrors

From Library Journal
Until he was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 24, Handler was a talented actor with a promising Broadway career and all the time in the world. But the bleak prognosis transformed time into "a concrete entity" not to be wasted. Resigning his understudy's role in Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues, Handler checked himself into New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, embarking on a five-year battle to get a second chance at life and time. Adapted from his successful off-Broadway one-man play, Time on Fire recounts with grim humor Handler's hellish journey through the land of the sick: insensitive doctors; experimental chemotherapies sometimes worse than the illness; awkward sex with his girlfriend in a hospital bathroom; remission, relapse, remission. Self-absorbed (with the actor's desire to be at the center of attention), Handler does not always come across as an admirable figure; he was hard on his supportive parents and girlfriend. "I must have been sheer hell to be around," he admits. "But I know it saved my life on several occasions." His honesty and tenacity, however, enable readers to cheer his eventual recovery

DJE: This is a memorable, irreverent book. Well worth reading. It's hard to get, better to try a library unless you are willing to spend ~ $10 including shipping from ABE Books.