#BuyThisBook: "Happiness in a Storm" by Dr. Wendy Harpham (How I met the author and why the right book makes a powerful gift)

I get a book in the mail almost every day. Publishers and PR firms have me on their lists as someone who reads alot, blurbs occasionally, blogs as often as possible, and is generally willing to do whatever I can to help other authors succeed. But yesterday I received a book from a friend. As a gift. It made me freshly sensitive to what a real gift is and why books make such potent and meaningful presents.

Backing up: In the spirit of "tis the season to sell, sell, sell", we're posting gift/book recommendations through the holidays. Today's book is...
Happiness in a Storm: Facing Illness and Embracing Life as a Healthy Survivor by Wendy Schlessel Harpham, MD
Recommended by Joni, who recommends it every chance she gets.
Perfect for anyone struggling with cancer or other serious illness in the family.

I first met Dr. Wendy Harpham in the pages of her second book, which was published at the very moment I needed it. The summer of 1995, I'd just finished several intense months of chemotherapy. I was physically and emotionally wrecked. My husband was shellshocked, my kids confused and frightened. I was emphatically NOT seeking out "cancer books", but Gary and I took the kids to Barnes & Noble every Friday night, where they could each select one book and then we all played Scrabble in the coffee shop. One night, we walked in, and I was confronted with a big ol' in-your-face FOS display of After Cancer: A Guide to Your New Life, which had come out in hardcover the previous year and was enjoying a burst of trade paperback release PR.

My new life? Everyone around me was telling me it was time to get back to "normal", but I knew that was not possible. Having someone acknowledge this felt like a hit off an oxygen tank. I started reading the prologue and was weeping three pages in. As a young internist with a private practice, Dr. Harpham had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was 36. Her children were 2, 4, and 6. I'd been diagnosed with lymphoma at age 32. My kids were 5 and 7. This was the first contact I had with anyone who'd been down the same terrifying path. She knew. She got it. She got me. We were the same kind of mom, same brand of striver, but Wendy had reached a perspective I wasn't even close to grasping -- until I read this book.

Flash forward a year to my first paid speaking gig as a shiny new debut author. I was giving the closing keynote at a survivorship conference in Albuquerque. Speaking earlier in the day was bestselling author Dr. Wendy Harpham. She blew the doors off the place, as she always does, and afterward, I waited at the end of a long line to get her autograph. My throat closed as I handed her my dogeared copy of After Cancer. At the moment of truth, I couldn't put into words what this book had meant to me, how deeply, personally, tangibly it had helped me. I just babbled something tearful. Wendy signed the book, then linked her arm through mine as if she'd been waiting for me. "Walk," she said, and let me tell you, this woman walks with purpose.

We hit the ladies room, then made for a line of buses that were taking conference attendees to dinner at a native American historical center, where we connected with our perfect third: Bernarda, a fabulous young medical student and fellow lymphomaniac. We laughed and chatted -- about cancer, of course, but more about life -- and each of us bought a little sand painting. Mine still hangs on the wall in my office next to a medicine wheel decorated with the long braids I cut off before chemo could take them from me. On the back of the sand painting is a gold sticker that says: "Navajo sandpainting is used by tribal medicine men as one of the traditional healing arts." Under that, Wendy and Bernarda signed their names, and Wendy (a stickler for details) wrote "October 5, 1996" along with Hebrew characters that translate to "kindred spirit".

Flash forward to Monday. I received a book in the mail. Wisdom's Daughters: Conversations with Women Elders of Native America written and photographed by Steve Walls. The card attached said only "For my dear friend"; it didn't need to say more. The moment I saw the etched figures on the cover, I was transported to that moment when an author who'd profoundly influenced my thinking became a friend who's profoundly influenced my life.

Which brings me to why the perfect book is so much more than a placeholder present that says "I'm obligated to give you something so here's this waffle iron." A book is a gift. It's evocative. Transporting. It says "I saw this, and it made my heart full of you. Because I get you. And I always will."

Buy This Book: Happiness in a Storm by Wendy Schlessel Harpham, MD

On her blog this weekend, physician, lymphoma survivor, and bestselling author Dr. Wendy Harpham marks the 20th anniversary of her cancer diagnosis and takes a moment to ask "Why me?" -- but not the way you think. Wendy says:

I feel humbled by the great mystery of my survivorship. In the course of my 20-years-and-still-counting journey, I've lost friends and family -- many of whom were diagnosed after me. I can only wonder why Wendy Schlessel Harpham is still walking, talking, writing, speaking, eating, loving and...living. Why me?

Wendy's first two books (published at exactly the moment I needed them) take survivors by the hand, addressing the hard information that needs to be dealt with in an accessible Q&A format. Both Diagnosis: Cancer: Your Guide to the First Months of Healthy Survivorship, Expanded and Revised Edition and After Cancer: A Guide to Your New Life were tremendously helpful to me and my family. But my favorite of Dr. Wendy's books is Happiness in a Storm: Facing Illness and Embracing Life as a Healthy Survivor. Oddly enough, this is one of the books that helped me cope with the slings and arrows that come with life in the publishing industry, because it's about letting go of the mindset that mires in "it's not fair!" and embracing a mindset that laughs and loves life for what it is: a hot mess.

Cancer Survivor's Bookshelf (recommended reading for phoenixes and the people who love them)

Sunday, I spoke at a National Cancer Survivor's Day event in Danbury CT, a beautifully organized and well-attended event that was a pure pleasure. Usually, I keynote conferences designed to educate cancer patients, families, onco nurses, social workers, and other care providers. I'm brought in as the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down; after my morning message, the day is filled with endless statistical lectures, where oncologists attempt to predict the future, and scary PowerPoint pie charts, where survivors sit there willing themselves to cling to the thinning slice of "lived to tell about it." Sunday's event had just one purpose: celebrate life. We came together to relish the fact that whatever happens in the future, we're alive now, and life is beautiful. Which isn't to say that education doesn't happen. Cancer survivors and caregivers quickly learn to network more effectively than college kids planning an off-site kegger. Breakfast was humming with supportive conversation, helpful hints, lots of laughter, and enthusiastic book recommendations.

As I made my way to the coffee area, I was secretly delighted to have my own book recommended to me by no less than half a dozen people. No one ever recognizes me from the author photo, as I'm nine years older and have hair now. (That fabulous bald noggin on the front cover is gorgeous Margaret Baker.) I suppose I should be coy and proper and leave it off this list, but the truth is, I'm proud as hell of this book and gratefully astonished at how people have connected with it. If I do say so myself (and yeah, I do, or I wouldn't have put so much work into it), it's a great book for anyone going through chemo or seeking to understand that experience. It's not a book about cancer, it's a book that reminds people: cancer exists only in the context of a life. Book clubs who've embraced it over the years made me realize it's actually a book about finding joy in whatever refining fire life dishes out.

The first two books I always recommend are Dr. Wendy Harpham's Diagnosis Cancer: Your Guide to the First Months of Healthy Survivorship (now in its third updated edition) and After Cancer: A Guide to Your New Life. Knowledge is power in general, and in this situation, knowledge is survival. Dr. Wendy was a young mother and an internist with a thriving private practice when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma almost 20 years ago. Her knowledge of all things cancer is unmatched, intimate, and absolutely up-to-the-minute. Her writing style is compassionate, literate, funny, and wise. These two books take all the unthinkable, terrifying crap you really must know in those first crucial years and deliver the information in an accessible Q&A format. I also direct survivors at all stages to Wendy's "On Healthy Survivorship" blog. (Check out this great post from last Friday: "Can you please shut up?" addresses the crazy-making issue of unwanted advice from the unschooled but well intentioned.)

Newsweek editor Jobathan Alter says Wendy's latest, Only 10 Seconds to Care: Help and Hope for Busy Clinicians, is "extraordinarily useful — not to mention compelling — for patients like me. She has x-ray vision that gets to the core of the doctor-patient relationship. This is a wise and insightful and deftly written book."

Another great book for the newly diagnosed "cancer couple" (an apt phrase I coined just this second) is Breast Cancer Husband: How to Help Your Wife (and Yourself) during Diagnosis, Treatment and Beyond by Marc Silver. The title says it all, and it delivers.

And screw chicken soup, Julia Sweeney delivers a Harvey Wallbanger for the soul with God Said, Ha!, which she did as a one-woman show (which really really should be out on DVD.) It's not about "laughing it off", it's about embracing an experience and laughing through it.

While I have to give it a "seriously dark and heavy" warning label, I really love Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking. I know our blah-blah-by-yer-bootstraps culture mandates that we spackle a "positive attitude" over our actual feelings so other people don't have to be made uncomfortable by our suffering, but the darkness of a shattering experience has to be explored for the fullness of the experience to be honored. This book basically wallows in grief, acknowledges the power of loss, and then moves on. Not happily or spunkilly or with a skip in the step, but still standing -- which is a marvel. Like I said, I wouldn't suggest it for infusion days, but this stage version is drastically condensed, much easier to take, and just as powerful.

The revised What to Eat if You Have Cancer: Healing Foods that Boost Your Immune System is a great sidekick, as is Eating Well Through Cancer: Easy Recipes & Recommendations During & After Treatment.

Last but not least is the book I suggest you tuck in your bag on your way to every chemo infusion: Where the Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. (You'll know what I mean, trust me.)

The perfect wrap up for yesterday's event -- the astonishingly good choir from a local high school came up after I spoke and sang this song that wrecks me to tears every time I hear it because it's so dang true and life, which has such music and laughter and good friends and great books in it, is so unbearably sweet.

Dr. Wendy Harpham on Oxygen

This week on her Healthy Survivorship blog, Dr. Wendy Harpham posts about a novel I recently read and liked a lot: Oxygen by Dr. Carol Cassella, an anesthesiologist, whose debut novel is a medical thriller/mystery written with a very Jodi Picoult issues-oriented-faux-lit-fiction feel.

From the Oxygen press kit:

Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Marie has carefully constructed and constricted her life according to empirical truths, to the science and art of medicine. But when her tried-and-true formula suddenly deserts her during a routine surgery, she must explain the nightmarish operating room disaster and face the resulting malpractice suit. Marie's best friend, colleague and former lover, Dr. Joe Hillary, becomes her closest confidante as she twists through depositions, accusations and a remorseful preoccupation with the mother of the patient in question. As she struggles to salvage her career and reputation, Marie must face hard truths about the path she's chosen, the bridges she's burned and the colleagues and superiors she's mistaken for friends.

Says Wendy:

[Oxygen] took my breath away. And not just because the story was gripping and the writing superb. This story brought into relief a growing fear of mine: the role of litigation in widening the disconnect between doctors and patients...

Most media coverage of the current litigious medical environment focuses on the sympathetic side of patients who've been hurt by incompetent and/or uncaring physicians. Oxygen brings into relief how dedicated, excellent physicians are negatively affected by lawsuits. Many resort to defensive medicine, routinely ordering extra tests and/or avoiding risky cases. Others leave medicine prematurely, deciding the risk isn't worth it.

Wendy's done more than anyone I know to bridge that doctor/patient gap. Forced to close her private practice after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, she started writing and became a bestselling tour de force. Check out the rest of her Oxygen review here and visit Wendy's website for a wealth of resources.