It takes courage to
survive
If you’ve ever wondered how you might find the courage, hope, and faith to face the challenges of cancer and caregiving, you’re not alone.
Get a glimpse into the inner journey of a cancer caregiver, a young wife and mother whose husband becomes a long-term survivor of brain cancer. It’s the whole family’s story of summoning courage, hope and faith while learning to cope not only with the practical aspects of cancer and caregiving but, most essentially, how to really survive—in your soul. Read more
Details
Dimensions
6 x 9
Pages
370
ISBN
9780985566500
Ebook ISBN
9780985566517
Hardcover price
$18.95
Two Louise Press
2012
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About the Author
Shelly L. Francis is an author, publisher, and speaker helping people unleash their creative courage. She has been a communicator in a range of business sectors from publishing to government to high tech and health care. Shelly grew up in Colorado reading fairy tales and stories of strong women, and writing her own, and is glad her first book was one to help others engage their own strengths. She was a delegate to the Lance Armstrong Foundation LIVESTRONG® Summit in 2006, where she pledged to publish this memoir as her personal action plan to raise awareness and effect change around the needs of cancer survivors. Shelly is now publisher of Creative Courage Press, excited to be collaborating with more remarkable authors. Read more…
From the Foreword
“The truthfulness of this book by Shelly Francis will help identify the many emotional, mental, and spiritual phases of walking with another soul on earth whose body has been struck by deep challenge. It’s the truth telling that readers in similar situations will resonate with.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves
Description
If you’ve ever wondered how you might find the courage, hope, and faith to face the challenges of cancer and caregiving, you’re not alone.
Damocles’ Wife reveals the inner journey of a cancer caregiver, a young wife and mother whose husband becomes a long-term survivor of brain cancer.
Follow their story, inside and out, through nine months of brain tumor treatment: neurosurgery, radiation, tumor doubles, second opinions, second surgery–this time awake– with photodynamic therapy, chemo, chemo, chemo, then high-dose chemotherapy with stem- cell rescue. Recovery…
Given a prognosis of two to five years, maybe ten, for his astrocytoma, Scott invoked his inner samurai to face aggressive traditional treatment, combined with integrative medicine like Healing Touch. Meanwhile, Shelly called on her inner resources, plus the rest of Scott’s caregiving crew, so that she could take care of him, herself, and their preschooler son, Wil, and still be standing no matter what.
This is the whole family’s story of learning to cope not only with the practical aspects of cancer and caregiving but, most essentially, how to really survive—in your soul. Join their journey as they learn to take down the Sword of Damocles hanging over Scott’s head and finally embrace life with all of its changes.
The first caregiver memoir to address long-term cancer survival, Damocles’ Wife will resonate with families facing cancer of all kinds, families dealing with chronic illness, disability, and dementia, as well as families of returning soldiers now facing life with traumatic brain injury. The book is a timely and poignant “case study” because in April 2012, TEDMED named “The Caregiving Crisis” the #2 most important health and medical issue of the year.
DAM-uh-kleez what?
The legend of the Damocles Sword goes back to the 4th century court of King Dionysius II where his pandering courtier Damocles wants to sit on the throne at a lush and wonderful feast. Dionysius invites Damocles to sit on his throne, but also arranges for a sharp sword to hang over Damocles’ head by the single hair of a horse’s tail, thus proving to Damocles the hard reality of “the fortunate man.”
In 1981, researchers named Gerald P. Koocher, PhD, and John D. O’Malley, MD, authored a book called The Damocles Syndrome in which they described the long-term, persistent fear that survivors of childhood cancer feel, ever wondering when their cancer might return and kill them.
In Damocles’ Wife, I offer my own viewpoint of how cancer caregivers are perhaps even more aware of that Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of their loved one and what the threat of cancer recurrence means for their own unknown future. Here is an excerpt from Damocles’ Wife:
“Only Scott and I knew, as we feasted, that a sharp samurai sword hung in the air over our table, over Scott’s head, his Sword of Damocles. From where I sat, I could see it quite plainly. Is that the caregiver’s curse–to notice that sword on a thread more often, more clearly, than the patient himself? It was time to step out from under that sword.”