THAT TIME I GOT CANCER

A memoir of one Pennsylvania man’s cancer struggle and how it transformed his relationships with his loved ones.

Around 2012, after experiencing strange symptoms that caused his face to swell and vision to blur, Zervanos found himself entangled in a medical mystery. Doctors struggled to figure out what caused an unprecedented and life-threatening blockage in the author’s superior vena cava (“the most important vein in the body”). It was a situation that made Zervanos—a husband, father, and teacher—confront his mortality and reassess his relationships with everything, and everyone, in his life. The reconstruction of Jim’s blocked blood vessel was apparently successful, but then the author was diagnosed with lymphoma, which required him to undergo treatment that threatened to undo the results of the surgery. During these crises, however, Zervanos found profound new meaning in “the bare essence of...life”—deeply appreciating the relationships he had with his family, choking back tears when he returned to his high school teaching job, and noting how he and his wife had the opportunity to get to “know each other all over again.” The memoir is delicately constructed and ably renders what it’s like to face the possibility of death. It also effectively renders the complex nature of one’s connections with other people and how one perceives the world vividly during frightening experiences. The memoir also refrains from painting the author as either a saint or a victim; instead, his history comes to embody how illness can be a disorienting, alienating, and ultimately redefining experience. His story is not simply about survival, but also about trust, anger, and being present for others—all inescapable facts of life.

A precise, moving, and expertly crafted remembrance.