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...

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.

Being Brett by Douglas Hobbie

Chronicle of a Daughter's Death

From Publishers Weekly
In this painfully honest account, Hobbie (Boomfell) details his daughter Brett's five-year battle with Hodgkin's disease. Brett, a talented 23-year-old artist, had just begun an independent life in San Francisco when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. Although the initial treatment appeared to be effective, the disease recurred and Brett continued chemotherapy and radiation, also undergoing a devastating bone marrow transplant. Hobbie paints a vivid picture of his energetic, loving daughter and their relationship, as well as the emotional impact of her condition on his wife, his other daughter and son and on Brett's incredibly supportive lover, Beth. When Brett's condition became hopeless, she returned with Beth to Massachusetts to be near her family. Hobbie's harrowing account of Brett's last days is a shattering portrait of how a family struggles through the loss of one of its beloved members.

This bok is available for ~ $1.00 from ABE Books

One Hundred Days by David Biro 2000

In 1996, at the age of 31, David Biro is preparing for his specialty examinations in dermatology and is set to share a practice with his father. But he develops a visual disturbance. After repeated testing, he is found to have the rare blood disorder of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. The diagnosis was problematic, but the treatment choices are overwhelming. His youngest sister is a suitable donor, and he opts for a bone marrow transplant. He realizes that his decision was influenced not only by the diagnosis, but also by his personality and his reaction to the physicians.

Advance preparations are hectic and sometimes comic, especially his deposits at a local sperm bank. The pain of the transplant and the six weeks imprisonment in a small hospital room are told in graphic detail. The athletically inclined doctor suffers many complications: exquisitely painful ulcers of the scrotum, mouth, and esophagus; inflammation of the liver; unexplained fever; drug-induced delirium; weakness and weight loss.

His parents, sisters and friends leap into action to provide round-the-clock presence, but his independent wife, Daniella, resents the invasion. While David’s body is wracked with drugs and radiation, his family and his marriage are subjected to destructive forces too. Yet all--body, family, and marriage--emerge intact, though changed, by their experience.
Commentary

This book is a physician-written autopathography. Biro knows that he is not the first doctor to learn that being a patient can be an unpleasant surprise. He recognizes that he has been sheltered, naive, privileged,

and perhaps even spoiled. He learns self-awareness and empathy from his encounter. The tale is interspersed with lucid clinical explanations of bone marrow function and transplantation, useful for those about to face this procedure.

But the power of his work comes from the superb portraits of the people whose lives are equally disrupted by his illness. The two (very real) physicians are juxtaposed: shy, cold but determined Castro; warm but cautious Luzzatto. The anxious mother and father, whose diaries are excerpted, reveal their individual fears and distinctive reasons for guilt. The remote, beautiful wife, who provides Biro’s greatest strength and joy. The title is a conscious reference to Bonaparte’s One Hundred Days, a military comeback that ended not in death, nor in victory, but in the nether world of an island prison, a state between health and disease.

This book can be bought for $1.00 plus shipping from AbeBooks.