Coming Home from Breast Cancerville is the story of how Liz and her family navigated the potholes and obstacles, ultimately finding the strength to create a new home with purpose and meaning on Survivor Highway. A must-read for anyone who wants to know what surviving actually looks like.
This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced breast cancer or knows someone who has. On the one hand it's an easy read, Liz's writing is engaging and at times laugh-out-loud funny, on the other, it's a difficult read. A lesson for me was that empathy comes at a price (I now know stuff about cancer I kind of wish I didn't). Liz is brutally honest about the impact breast cancer has had on her life and the lives of her husband and three girls.
Using her childhood road trips with parents and four siblings in a VW Kombi van as a metaphor, Liz explains the three stages of her journey: treatment highway, recovery highway and survivor highway. She talks about the impact on her physical health, on her mental health, on her marriage, on her family and on her finances and career. It took her a long time to realise her journey was not going to be a round-trip. She has gradually come to accept, and even embrace, the fact that she will never be the same person she was before the breast cancer.
If there's one thing I think people should take away from the book, it's the need for free ongoing counselling not just for the patient but also for their immediate family. It had never occured to me that people who survive cancer might suffer from PTSD as a result of their experience, or that their whole family might.
If you want to reach out to someone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer I suggest you buy this book, read it yourself and then send them a copy.
An excellent book that weaves love & humour through the brutal experiences of cancer treatment and its ongoing aftermath. There is a warmth here that lets the reader digest frank accounts of cancer's impacts on all aspects of life: the body and soul, the family, the home, the house, friends, and yes, on the budget.
Coming Home from Breast Cancerville is a great help in understanding the effects of this terrible journey on the person and the family - and how to provide the acts of service that are so very needed along the way.
Even if cancer has not been a part of your journey, the honesty and openness of this book will give you the opportunity to reflect on who you are, and how you are dealing with the slings and arrows of life's hard road.
For anyone who has experienced cancer, or has had a family member, friend or colleague experience cancer, this book is a must read!
Several times I laughed out loud whilst reading Liz’s book. But equally at times, I wanted to cry. Liz does not hold back on shining a spotlight on the harsh realities of what ‘behind the scenes’ living with cancer can mean.
Liz has a warm writing style that captures and engages the reader throughout. You’ll want to finish the book in one sitting!
I only wish I’d read this book sooner so that I could have been a better friend to those I have know going through a similar ordeal.