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Holding Tight, Letting Go: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer

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This is a book about life: the day-to-day lives of ordinary individuals confronting a deadly disease.Holding Tight, Letting Go delivers the stories of 40 women and men as they struggle to come to terms with metastatic breast cancer. All elements of dealing with the illness are covered right here: from coping with the shock of recurrence and searching for info, to producing therapy choices, investigating alternative and complementary approaches, and communicating properly with medical personnel. Finding source

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3 responses to “Holding Tight, Letting Go: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer”

  1. hiwater@teleport.com Avatar
    hiwater@teleport.com
    16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
    5.0 out of 5 stars
    helpful and realistic, August 4, 1998
    By A Customer
    This review is from: Holding Tight, Letting Go: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer (Paperback)

    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.

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  2. Dr. Karen M. Gray "kmgrayphd" Avatar
    Dr. Karen M. Gray “kmgrayphd”
    7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
    5.0 out of 5 stars
    Musa has written the book I needed to find 5 years ago., October 7, 1997
    By 
    hiwater@teleport.com (Pam Hiebert – Portland, Oregon) –

    This review is from: Holding Tight, Letting Go: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer (Paperback)

    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.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous
    2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
    5.0 out of 5 stars
    This is a “must” for anyone with a potentially fatal disease, October 1, 1997
    By 
    Dr. Karen M. Gray “kmgrayphd” (Hagerstown, MD United States) –
    (REAL NAME)
      

    Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
    This review is from: Holding Tight, Letting Go: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer (Paperback)

    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.

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