A harrowing, intimately candid survivor’s journey through the minefields of cancer treatment.
A vibrant mental health expert’s bout with brain cancer and the revolutionary treatments that saved her life.
In 2015, Lipska, a veteran neuroscientist and triathlete who studies brains at the National Institute of Mental Health, found herself in a panic while out jogging in her suburban Virginia neighborhood. Without warning, she suddenly didn’t recognize her surroundings and became severely disoriented. Her confusion dissipated, and then she received a devastating diagnosis of metastatic melanoma in her brain. The resulting grueling two-month ordeal battling debilitating mental problems forms the core of this intensive memoir. The author briefly sketches the details of her history as a young, ambitious research scientist in Poland who eventually moved her family to America to pursue the study of brain illnesses and schizophrenia. In 2009, she underwent a mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis. In frank, unfettered prose, Lipska clearly demonstrates her courage, resilience, and pure dread in the face of disease and adversity. Of the three tumors found in her brain, one particularly “nasty raisin,” vexingly located in the folds of her visual cortex,” was bleeding. Though excised immediately, the author’s mental acuity deteriorated. Through urgent and vigorous passages, the author chronicles a valiant fight for her life, with radiation treatments and an immunotherapy trial, which caused a whole new subset of medical maladies. Toward the end of the treatment plan, her behavior went haywire, and she suffered cognitive impairment, rage, paranoia, and bafflement, all of which crowded out any semblance of rationality. Eventually, however, the treatments worked, and Lipska experienced a miraculous (and statistically rare) “second chance at sanity.” Throughout it all, the sheer irony of her ordeal never escaped her: “I am living through some of the processes of a disease that I’ve spent my life studying and trying to cure.”
A harrowing, intimately candid survivor’s journey through the minefields of cancer treatment.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-78730-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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