More good ink

If I dedicated a post to each new exciting development in our friend Brian's journey in publishing "Mom's Cancer", this would quickly evolve into a blog about "Mom's Cancer". Fortunately, that blog already exists, leaving me to just occasionally remind you all of this astonishing little book and to occasionally point out a particularly good or well-placed article or interview about the book and others like it.

This USA Today article is one of those. (For non-US readers, it's helpful to note that USA Today has the widest circulation of any newspaper in the USA. Worldwide, among English-language broadsheets, it's second only the The Times of India.)

It's hard to explain why Mom's Cancer resonated with me so remarkably and affected me so deeply, given that I am one of the fortunate ones whose family is practically untouched by the particular disease. I know it had a lot to do with recognizing a family of fellow travelers in the involuntary Secret Society of hospitals and medicine, where you are initiated through trials by agony and numbing boredom, where you learn to speak the language of no-nonsense professionals and where the absolutely inconceivable ("they want to put a WHAT in my WHERE?") becomes the mundane. But it was the humour in particular - that this family was dealing with things just exactly the way that Husband and I always had, in order to avoid the alternative - insanity and panic and despair.

Clearly, we were not the only ones.

Enjoy the article and check out the other offerings mentioned therein. We need to find a better way to deal with "the big C", the Mother of all Diseases, the terror that lurks in the back of our collective consciousness. These writers and artists are helping us do so, to the enormous benefit of millions of cancer patients and survivors.

ronnie