The Yellow World: How Fighting for My Life Taught Me How to Live
176
The Yellow World: How Fighting for My Life Taught Me How to Live
176Paperback
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Overview
My heroes don’t wear red capes. They wear red bands.
Albert Espinosa never wanted to write a book about cancer—so he didn’t. Instead, he shares his most touching, funny, tragic, and happy memories in the hopes that others, healthy and sick alike, can draw the same strength and vitality from them.
At thirteen, Espinosa was diagnosed with cancer, and he spent the next ten years in and out of hospitals, undergoing one daunting procedure after another, starting with the amputation of his left leg. After going on to lose a lung and half of his liver, he was finally declared cancer-free. Only then did he realize that the one thing sadder than dying is not knowing how to live. In this rich and rewarding book, Espinosa takes us into what he calls “the yellow world,” a place where fear loses its meaning; where strangers become, for a moment, your greatest allies; and where the lessons you learn will nourish you for the rest of your life.
U.K. praise for The Yellow World
“With its uplifting message and simple philosophy, [The Yellow World] has the makings of a spiritual classic.”—The Sunday Times
“[An] energetic rush of a book . . . that shines with comedy and grace.”—The Independent
“Heartwarming . . . the book everyone’s talking about.”—Mail on Sunday
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345538123 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2014 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.18(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.48(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
9780345538123|excerpt
Espinosa / THE YELLOW WORLD
Beginning . . .
The Yellow World
Don’t hold the knife in your left hand.
Don’t put your elbows on the table.
Fold your napkin properly.
That’s the beginning.
—Gabriel Celaya
Where Were You Born?
Well, I was born from cancer. I like the word cancer. I even like the word tumor. It might sound creepy but it’s just that my life has been connected to these two words. And I’ve never felt anything horrible about saying cancer or tumor or osteosarcoma. I grew up with these words and I like to say them out loud, to shout them at the top of my voice. I think that until you say them, make them part of your life, then it’s difficult for you to accept them.
That’s why I need to speak about cancer in this first chapter, because later in the book I’m going to explain the lessons that cancer taught me to survive my life. So I’ll start off by talking about it and how it affected me.
I was fourteen years old when I had to go to the hospital for the first time. I had an osteosarcoma in my left leg. I left school, left my home, and started my life in the hospital.
I had cancer for ten years, from the ages of fourteen to twenty-four. This doesn’t mean that I spent ten years in the hospital but that for ten years I was going to various different hospitals to get treated for four cancers: leg, leg (same leg both times), lung, and liver.
En route I left behind one leg, one lung, and a chunk of my liver. But I have to say that, at the time, I was happy when I had cancer. I remember it as one of the best times of my life.
It might be a shock to see these two words next to each other: happy and cancer. But that’s how it was. The cancer might have taken material things away from me, but it taught me lots of other things that I would never have found out by myself.
What can cancer give you? I think the list is endless: You find out who you are, you find out what sort of people you live with, you discover your limits . . . above all you lose your fear of death. Maybe this last is the most valuable thing.
One day I was cured. I was twenty-four and they told me that I didn’t have to go back to the hospital. I was scared stiff. It was weird. The thing I knew how to do best of all was to fight against cancer and now they told me that I was cured. This weirdness, this stupor, lasted for six hours, then I went mad with joy; not to go back to the hospital, not to have any more X-rays (I think I’d had more than two hundred and fifty), no more blood tests, no more tests of any kind. It was a dream come true. It was completely unbelievable.
I thought that in a few months I’d forget all about cancer. I’d have a “normal life.” Cancer would just be a stage I’d gone through. But instead (I’ve never forgotten it), something strange happened. I never imagined how much the lessons of cancer would help me in my daily life.
It’s the great gift that cancer has given me: lessons (you have to call them something, although maybe I prefer the word discoveries) that help my life to be easier, happier.
What I will explain in this book is nothing more than how to apply to your day-to-day life the lessons I learned from cancer. Yes, exactly, now that I think of it, that’s what this book could be called: How to Use Cancer to Get Through Life. Maybe that’ll end up being the book’s subtitle. It sounds odd, it sounds just the opposite of most of the books that get written about cancer, but that’s just how it is. Life is paradoxical (I love contradictions). I want to make it clear that this book is a collection of everything I learned from cancer and also of the discoveries that my friends who were also fighting this illness showed me.
Well, that’s the story of cancer and me up till now. I like how I’ve summed it up; I’m happy with it. The story has begun. Now let’s carry on with the yellow world.
Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Beginning…: The Yellow World
Where Were You Born? 3
What Is the Yellow World? 6
Carrying On…: List of Discoveries to Make Your World Yellow
1 Losses are positive 13
2 The word pain doesn't exist 18
3 The energy that appears after thirty minutes is what you need to solve a problem 23
4 Ask five good questions every day 28
5 Show me how you walk and I'll show you how to laugh 32
6 When you are sick, they keep tabs on your life, a medical record. When you are well, you should do the same: Keep a life record 37
7 There are seven tricks to being happy 43
8 What you hide the most reveals the most about you 48
9 Put your lips together and blow 51
10 Don t be afraid of being the person you have become 54
11 Find what you like looking at, then look at it 58
12 Start counting at six 61
13 The search for the south and the north 65
14 Listen to yourself when you're angry 67
15 Positive wanking 70
16 The difficult thing isn't accepting how you are, but how everyone else is 72
17 The power of contrasts 75
18 Hibernate for twenty minutes 79
19 Look for your hospital roommates outside of the hospital 82
20 Do you want to share an REM with me? 87
21 The power of the first time 90
22 A way never to get angry 93
23 The best way to know if you love someone 96
23 Discoveries That Connect Two Ages: From Fourteen to Twenty-four 98
Living…: The Yellows
The Yellows 103
How Do You Find Yellows and How Do You Identify Them? 120
Yellow Q&A 128
Conclusions About Yellows 136
And Relax…: The Yellow End
The Yellow End 141
Epilogue 149
Afterword Eloy Azorín 151