Chemo This!: Finding Your Balance and Creating a Pathway Through Cancer

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is the author of Nations Are Built of Babies:
Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

As is often the case with advice literature written by survivors,
Patricia McBain-Roberts speaks honestly but reassuringly about the
challenges of grappling with cancer. She does not attempt to cover the
very real fear that comes with diagnosis of breast cancer, an affliction
that affects one in eight Canadian women. Yet her focus is on personal
knowledge, and on the ways in which becoming informed of all options and
being actively engaged in the treatment process are critical to both
emotional and physical healing.

McBain-Roberts reveals her own spiritual growth as she recounts her
experience of treatment and recovery. At the same time, her book is
grounded in practical, day-to-day experiences, and much of what she
suggests is intended to help patients and their families and friends
cope with the immediate anxieties and discomforts that arise in
treatment—from the traumatic loss of hair, to paying for expensive
drugs, to the importance of maintaining “a sense of the ridiculous.”


Chapter 11, “The Spouse Speaks,” provides a first-person account by
the author’s husband, which will be very helpful to loved ones who
have to bear witness and are often at a loss as to what is the most
supportive way to respond. McBain-Roberts also offers a useful list of
information resources for patients and their family and friends, who
will find this book a courageous and helpful guide along their own
pathway.