Songs from a Lead Lined Room

Successful novelist Shea (Hoopi Shoopi Donna, LJ 4/15/96) was 41 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000. Here, she offers an eloquent evocation of the breast cancer experience and mindset. Her surgery went well, with no lymph node involvement, so she faced radiation therapy. As Shea acknowledges, she isn't a good patient, but her description of the mechanics as well as the "psychology" of radiation, presented in diary-like chapter, will inform and help others going through the ordeal. And an ordeal it is, over six weeks, five days a week, enduring the fatigue and the skin irritation ("a red and peeling and blistering mess"), only to be told by one well-intentioned acquaintance, "But it's not like you had chemotherapy. Now that would be something to complain about." Jamie Bernard's Breast Cancer, There & Back (LJ 9/1/01) provides more detail of the process of radiation therapy, but Shea's prose captures the reader and makes you root for her with all your heart. "If I have to have cancer, have it tip my life over as it has, I want some kind of prize at the end," she says. We are the prize winners, with this glorious book as our reward. Highly recommended.