One Woman’s Step-by-Step Survival Guide
SURVIVING CANCER
By Margie Levine
Broadway Books
234 pages, $12.95
Margie Levine has defied the odds. In 1989, top doctors at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston gave her only six months to live. They’d found mesothelioma, a rare, extremely aggressive lung malignancy related to asbestos exposure. Today, Levine is the world’s longest-living survivor of the disease. In this inspirational handbook, Levine, a social worker, therapist and health educator, shares her prescription for survival, one that turned a cancer patient with a death sentence into an activist who helped assure that she had a future.
Her book, written in short, engaging chapters, combines acceptance of what conventional medicine has to offer with advocacy of mind-body techniques and good nutrition. Levine pays attention to spirituality and appreciation for humor, nature, music, friendship and joy.
In walking readers through her path to wellness, Levine at every step of the way offers tips on how to ask the right questions, make sure doctors are working for your best interests, and bolster your psyche. As she says in her book: “Nature takes good care of us, by and large, but we must also take good care of ourselves. We must look for the first ray of light, as night gives way, and then another, and another.”
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MIND, BODY AND SOUL
A Guide to Living With Cancer
By Nancy Hassett Dahm
Taylor Hill Publishing 309 pages, $27.95
As a registered nurse specializing in cancer care, Nancy Hassett Dahm has cared for more than 400 end-stage patients in the last decade. This book is a manual for getting good care--including how to evaluate doctors and nursing aides and how to win battles with your HMO--and a critique of the current system. It’s also a guidebook for caregivers.
Dahm is disturbed that so many doctors are undereducated about pain management and thus undertreat their cancer patients’ physical misery. She provides direction for patients and families trying to maximize good quality of life. Dahm focuses on giving patients’ optimism, telling them that 90% of cancer pain can be controlled, and encouraging them to think positive because there are 8 million cancer survivors.
At the same time, she tries to touch on the specifics of cancer treatments and medications, hospital services and home care, with instructions for helping a dying patient through their final moments to make that passage as smooth and gentle as possible for the patient and loved ones.
