My current focus is a memoir about my wife’s breast cancer treatment.
Treatment was a few years ago but recovery from the consequences of treatment has taken some years. It’s an interesting story, rooted in human interest but full of technical detail. Debbie's breast cancer treatment experience was more complex than most. She was in the extreme one percent for how hard chemotherapy hit her. Her experience of cancer treatment did not work out anywhere near the standard expectations.
The story comes in a blend of forms
- It's a gritty contemporary romance – Debbie and I faced a big challenge. We got through it together. Debbie was the heroine who faced this experience with her own strength and me, her husband in a supporting role. Like some romance novels, you may read this and think it could be you. Much as I’d like the story to have a “happily ever after” ending, a cancer survivor is permitted only “happy enough for now.”
- Or a romantic fantasy – You might read about me and think to yourself I'm not a husband who could really happen. The memoir shows a man stepping up to a caring and nurturing role, staying consistent for months. I am open, I share my feelings. I’m empathetic about Debbie's experience. I pay attention to boosting Debbie’s mental health and self-image in addition to her physical care. This book is about Debbie, then about us, then about me.
- There’s a through-line of medical thriller – Debbie suffered all kinds of complications because she had the roughest response to the treatments. The patient lives, but some days in the middle of the experience she wasn’t all that confident this would be the outcome. It's a true story, but first it's a compelling story.
- Or a cozy medical thriller - all the gritty details are accompanied by a sweet an intimate look at a couple dealing with the stress.
- It's medical self-help – We learned about maximizing the patient's influence over a complicated medical process. You can read about our mistakes, I describe every one we know about, what we learned and how we changed what we were doing. It's caregiver self-help, too, discussing how I dealt with the challenge and helped her deal with the challenge. (And sorry, no, it isn't self-help to treat your own cancer.)
The memoir is everything we experienced. Too many cancer memoirs start with diagnosis and end with the end of treatment. The entire second half of our story is recovery from treatment, which took us years. Recovery was a time of still more medical drama as well as more romance.
Like most memoirs, our story comes with trigger warnings – read them on the page about the book.
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