£17.99

Author: Dr Maurice Slevin & Dr Nira Kfir

The shock of finding out that you – or a relative or friend – has cancer can make you feel that life has descended into chaos.

Written by a cancer specialist and a psychotherapist, this book aims to help you make sense of your diagnosis, and to help you move away from chaos towards a situation where you feel you have control back in your life.

This inspiring book explores the use of information, emotional support and the provision of options to help trigger changes in people’s lives. It shows you how through shared experience change and movement can emerge from chaos.

Challenging Cancer:

• Gives you the information you need to feel in control of your cancer
• Allows you to read about and benefit from weekend seminars run by the authors
• Discusses the concept of crisis and intervention, with the aims of helping people with cancer overcome their feelings of frustration
• Has a detailed section describing how Vicky Clement-Jones (the founder of Cancerbackup) challenged her disease, and how she tried to encourage people with cancer to discover their freedom and to use it in their own way

Contents:

Part 1  The weekend seminar

• Meeting each other
• Crisis in time
• Facing life, facing death
• Family relationships: discussion with supporters
• Family relationships: discussion with patients
• Talking with children

Part 2  Looking at cancer

• What can you do to help yourself?
• Cancer: knowing the enemy

Part 3  From victims to heroes by force of circumstance   

• Fighting back
• Crisis and control
• Support: the double message
• Taking control [includes 3 case studies]

Part 3  “Cancer freed me” – the story of Vicky Clement-Jones and the creation of CancerBACUP   

• Meeting Vicky
• An exceptional patient
• Order after chaos: the start of BACUP (now Cancerbackup)
• Towards heroism
• Understanding Vicky
• On her own life
• Observations

“I cannot commend this book too highly, on both the physical and emotional levels”
Claire Rayner

“Unbelievably optimistic and a haunting inspiration”
Woman Magazine