List Books » The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming: And Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer
Authors: Jennie Nash
ISBN-13: 9780452283664, ISBN-10: 0452283663
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: December 2001
Edition: REPRINT
Jennie Nash is the author of Altared States: Surviving the Engagement. Her writing has been featured in Glamour, Mademoiselle, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the national spokesperson for the Ford Motor Company's Breast Cancer Awareness Program.
On a hunch, Jennie Nash went in for a mammogram and discovered she had breast cancer.
After she discovered that a close friend from high school days was diagnosed with advanced metastatic lung cancer, Nash (Altared States: Surviving the Engagement, 1992), a freelance writer, knew intuitively that a tightness on the left side of her chest was a sign of breast cancer. Her first mammogram was negative, but at a six-month follow-up, 35-year-old Nash was diagnosed with the disease. In this forthright memoir, the author recalls in a series of chapters labeled "lessons" what she learned from going through the ensuing mastectomy and breast reconstruction. In Lesson #2 ("Bad News Does Less Damage When It's Shared"), she explains how the support of her husband, who lost his mother to breast cancer, her family and friends was a "critical component" to her recovery. In another touching but almost lighthearted lesson ("Courage Doesn't Always Dress in Camouflage"), Nash describes a party that she attended shortly before her operation, where she turned heads by uncharacteristically wearing a sexy red dress. Although she did not require chemotherapy or radiation (her margins were clean), Nash did suffer from the physical aftereffects of a free-flap reconstructive surgery that she nonetheless never regretted having. She shares the difficulties of discussing the illness with her two daughters, aged three and seven, and other stressful family events: during her recuperation, a feud developed between her husband and her mother that was obviously a result of the emotional toll her illness took on them. This honest account of a young mother who survived breast cancer will be helpful to others in the same situation. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Introduction | 13 | |
Lesson 1 | Survival Is a Matter of Instinct | 15 |
Lesson 2 | Bad News Does Less Damage When It's Shared | 35 |
Lesson 3 | It's Important to Eat Cake | 47 |
Lesson 4 | Courage Doesn't Always Dress in Camouflage | 59 |
Lesson 5 | Daddy Can't Always Keep the Monsters Away, but He Can Fold the Laundry | 67 |
Lesson 6 | The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming | 83 |
Lesson 7 | Magic Happens | 89 |
Lesson 8 | Caregivers Are Human | 105 |
Lesson 9 | Sometimes Crying Is the Point | 125 |
Lesson 10 | Take the Gifts People Have to Give | 129 |
Lesson 11 | Modesty Is Irrelevant | 133 |
Lesson 12 | Sometimes the Good Die Young | 141 |
Lesson 13 | Make the Experience Matter | 145 |
Epilogue | 151 | |
Acknowledgments | 155 |