Books are the devil, m'kay?

I'm remembering right now just why I declare a moratorium on recreational reading while school's in. Once I start reading something, I don't stop. I started reading Erin Zammett's book, plowed right through the first six chapters of it, and nearly went ahead and started in on the rest of it before I realized it was nearly one in the morning and I'd be getting up again in a few hours. So, I decided to finish it tomorrow and go ahead and blog about it before bed tonight.

Saying "what a great book" just really doesn't do this book justice. I'm really impressed by Zammett's honesty and frankness, her willingness to share so much of such a personal and life-changing experience. I keep finding myself fixated on her ability to take something good from the experience, and I can't help but wonder how much resolve to find that sort of understanding I would have had. I guess it gets progressively easier to be philosophical about it as time goes on and you get acclimated to something like that, but that she approached what she was dealt the way she did really strikes a chord with me.

I guess I could say I'm a little familiar with the territory. Around twenty years ago, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She's fine today, well, fine in the context of being a cancer survivor. She had a radical masectomy to get rid of the mass, and they pretty much took out every lymph node on her left side to get rid of places that the cancer had spread to. Today that means she gets sick more often than she would otherwise; I guess that beats the heck out of cancer, though.

Parts of Zammett's story really resonated with me. On good days my family could laugh about it - I think Reader's Digest has run a piece called "Laughter - the Best Medicine" for ages for a good reason. The bad days were completely emotionally draining. That Zammett was keeping notes about it all as this was unfolding in her life is just really remarkable, but then my natural inclination is to try not to think about things at all, instead of processing everything and having some kind of a cathartic release. Moreover, from a family member's point of view, 20 years on down the road, I remember events from my mom's cancer in something like an undifferentiated mass - thoughts like wondering if my mom was going to die exist right alongside recollections of playing cards in the hospital with her day after day. I couldn't write an account now like the one Zammett wrote to save my life, and that's assuming I had half her talent to start with. The details are just too fragmented, and far too susceptible to being shaped by the decades I've had to think about it.

On the other hand, life's thrown other curveballs to my family that I haven't had the benefit of years to come to terms with. I could really stand to take a long look at the ability to identify the good in what it'd be easy to take as a categorically negative experience. Talking about things to help you internalize them, sharing them because someone else might very well stand to gain something for having heard your experience... these are things I could stand to put some serious thought into. I don't know that I'd commit to giving it a whirl - that's a pretty tall order - but it's definitely food for thought.