Getting Through It: My Year of Cancer during Covid

by Helen Epstein

Overview

Just after Covid arrived in North America in spring 2020, journalist Helen Epstein was diagnosed with endometrial cancer — one of a predicted 66,570 new cases of cancer of the uterine body in the United States in 2021. About 600,000 American women have had it.

A candid and eye-opening account of a medical steeplechase of surgery, chemo and radiation therapy, Getting Through It brings together reporting, statistical research and elements of memoir to tell a timely and important story about the changing nature of the contemporary medical world.

Advance praise for Getting Through It:

"In this eloquent narrative, journalist Helen Epstein brings her decades of skill to the tasks of chronicling the 'badge of illness' that a gynecological cancer diagnosis brought her. Unsparing in its measure of fear, chemically induced forgetting, and loss of control, we are treated to an honest appraisal of the cancer experience. This book is at once a reminder of our expectation of independence and the need for dependence that makes us deeply human." — Susan M. Reverby, McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

"A fast read and eye-opening memoir that both doctors and patients will find valuable. Frank and funny, Epstein describes the myriad of life complexities, doubts, unanswered questions, and fears experienced by cancer patients and the people who love them." — Audrey Konow, MD, Internist/Hospitalist, Providence St. Jude Medical Center

"Getting Through It is a profoundly important book – not only for cancer patients, but for their families, friends, policy makers, and health care professionals. Epstein writes with breathtaking clarity about the challenges of undergoing treatment for a silent killer. Candid, compelling and psychologically astute." — Helen Fremont, Author of After Long Silence and The Escape Artist

"In this astonishingly candid book, Helen applies her laser focus to the day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute experience of experiencing cancer and its treatments during a pandemic. She describes a cast of fascinating doctors and nurses and the sometimes unexpected behavior of friends. Most beautiful is the inspiring portrait of her marriage with a partner who is there every step of the way. An enormously engaging, compulsively readable memoir." — Susan Miron, Book Critic-at-Large

Product Details

BN ID:	2940161058121
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	04/21/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	331 KB

About the Author

Journalist Helen Epstein (http://www.helenepstein.com) is the author, translator or co-author of 10 books of non-fiction. Her classic Children of the Holocaust (1979), published in an anniversary Penguin edition in 2020, has been called “An enormous achievement, heart-wrenching and unforgettable” by the Chicago Tribune, and paved the way for a wave of second-generation writers including Eva Hoffman and Art Spiegelman, as well as hundreds of academic studies. Children of the Holocaust was followed by Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History, of which Gloria Steinem wrote “In Epstein’s expert and sensitive hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction, but more magnetic, wise and powerful.” The third book in the trilogy is The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma. The trilogy was reviewed in an essay by Irena Klepfisz in Tablet Magazine.

Epstein’s books have been translated into ten languages and drive an extensive speaking schedule at universities, religious and cultural institutions, hospitals, and museums. See her at the University of California, San Diego (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzBo-uYLmZI

Born in Prague in 1947, Helen grew up in New York City, where she attended Hunter College High School. After graduating from Columbia Journalism School, she became the first tenured woman in New York University’s Department of Journalism where she taught over 1,000 students. Her journalism has appeared in the Sunday New York Times, Washington Post, the Jerusalem Post, the Boston Globe, New York, newyorker.com and the online New England cultural magazine artsfuse.com. Her books include Joe Papp: An American Life (Putnam, Da Capo), Music Talks (McGraw-Hill) and the English translation of Under A Cruel Star by Heda Kovaly. Most recently, she edited and annotated her late mother’s memoir Franci’s War (Penguin, 2020). It was published in eight countries and is awaiting German translation.

She has two sons and two grandchildren and lives in Massachusetts.