Holding Tight, Letting Go

by Musa Mayer

This is a book about life: the daily lives of ordinary people confronting a deadly disease. Holding Tight, Letting Go offers the stories of 40 women and men as they struggle to come to terms with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565922549
• ISBN13: 9781565922549
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Patient Center Guides
• Length: 510 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

helpful and realistic

A personalized and at the same time highly informed guide to life with breast cancer. A subsample of highly articulate Breast Cancer Discussion List participants, who agreed to be interviewed by Mayer, are repeatedly quoted throughout, as Mayer invokes their voices and occasionally her own, to put the realities of life with cancer into an experiential context, then place these experiences into the appropriate wider context of medical expertise or psychotherapeutic wisdom. Topics covered: the shock of recurrence, treatment choices, complementary therapies, side effects, family and friends, remissions, disease progression, hard choices and last days. Well-balanced treatment of everything, but most crucially the controversial High-dose Chemotherapy decision. A truly impressive compendium of resources unfolds in Appendices B and C. Mayer assumes (and this was news to me, unwelcome news) that a depressing percentage of those who are touched by breast cancer will event! ually, maybe in a few months, maybe in a couple of decades, have to deal with a metastasis. Life with the metastasis may then go on for another 12 or so years, even longer as new treatments come on line. There may be blissful further remissions during this phase or a lurching from crisis to crisis until the end. One husband of a breast cancer sufferer wrote of their experience: "This disease began as a mist, deepened into a fog, and ended like a tornado." Life in this sort of world, similar in ways to life in HIV-land and both vastly alien to the world of the healthy, is made more tolerable by the companionship of others that is offered by books like this. Mayer's emphasis is on the real. "Real help comes from hearing real stories, and from learning you are not alone." "In real lives, along with precious moments of peace and transcendence, there is also pain and anger and a terrible sadness." Will appeal to: People such as those rep! resented by the Breast Cancer Discussion List - educated, ! secular-but-spiritual, liberal and accepting of Western medicine.

Musa has written the book I needed to find 5 years ago.

When I was first diagnosed with metastatic cancer, nearly five years ago, my most difficult adjustment was facing the reality of my situation. Publications I desperately needed to read hadn't yet been written. Musa Mayer has written the book I needed to find five years ago. As a contributor, I wanted to cross over the ocean of suffering and connect to life. As the author, Musa has taken the larger step of daring to look beyond her own fears, to the reality of lives with metastatic breast cancer. She is able to demonstrate a reality filled with human emotion... beyond the blanket of fear. This is the book that would have taught me that I am not alone. The stories, the resources, a vision of a larger reality in a world of personal ambiguity. I am proud to have contributed to this effort.

This is a "must" for anyone with a potentially fatal disease

Ms. Mayer has used her own wisdom and the voices of people who have metastatic breast cancer as well as of their family, friends, significant others and breast cancer activists to explore the difficulties and possibilities of life with a potentially terminal disease. The book is inspirational, profound and practical. If you are human, you are likely to die of a terminal disease and you will find this book helpful in charting your course and making your journey through such an experience as positive as possible.