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WAIT, IT GETS WORSE

Book Cover

A debut memoir explores love,
cancer, and learning to live in the moment.

On June 29, 2012, Slaby and her
husband, Michael, were preparing to finish work (she at a Chicago law firm, he
with the Barack Obama re-election campaign) before boarding a plane for New
York to attend a friend’s wedding. But first she had to see her doctor. She had
been suffering from shortness of breath. Her physician detected a heart
irregularity and insisted she see a cardiologist immediately. What followed
became a nightmare medical saga. X-rays and CT scans revealed a
grapefruit-sized tumor pressing down on her heart: “My tumor was pushing on my
heart, which reacted to protect itself by filling the sac where it lives with fluid.
There was so much fluid, however, that my heart was under attack from its own
protection.” The author was diagnosed with stage 2 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Chemotherapy, the prescribed treatment, first involved discussions of how to
preserve her fertility. She was only 33 years old. While the tumor was not
removed surgically, chemotherapy successfully shrank it. And then a December
2012 follow-up PET scan showed her thymus lighting up. It could be nothing—the
tumor, now one-quarter of its original size, may have wound around her thymus.
Or it could be something dire. The ensuing surgery involved cracking open her
chest. Then a medical error almost caused her death. Slaby’s narrative is about
much more than cancer. Although the unusual complexity of the sequential
medical emergencies the author endured, which she details in lucid, graphic
prose, threatens to overwhelm the memoir, she also presents a tender love
story. Slaby deftly intersperses portions that recall the shifting up-and-down
dynamics of her long relationship with Michael. These sections, despite the
periods of great turmoil, offer readers respite from the grueling medical
drama. As she worked toward physical, psychological, and emotional recovery,
the author meticulously documents how difficult it was for her, a
self-described “control freak,” to let go of the past and find “grace and
kindness inside the unexpected.”

An engrossing, informative, and
sometimes-frightening medical account that ends on an inspirational high note.

kirkusreviews.com

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