C List (eBook)

Bowel cancer, despite being the UK's second biggest cancer killer, still receives a shockingly low level of awareness. This book aims to redress this by telling the story of a mother of two who embarked on a crash course dealing with advanced bowel cancer at the age of 45. Having absolutely no preparation, her lists help her gain control over what fast becomes an even more chaotic and unpredictable life. Her diagnosis presents a wake-up call to what's important in life, and insists that daft and often funny things can still happen to people living with cancer. This is a memoir packed full of useful advice for making the best of your sudden situation – from learning how to deal with your new menagerie of medics to how to avoid all the usual cancer faux pas! As someone who describes herself as habitually 'not doing today what I can put off till tomorrow', Rachel shares with you all the lists you need to cope with gaining back some control from the chaos. This is the ultimate reader-friendly guide on how to deal with operation after operation, the reality of chemotherapy and, when that's over, how to function on a daily basis with your 'new normal'. But most importantly, it's a record of how Rachel taught her children resilience, her number one challenge in life.

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This is not a 'misery memoir'. Neither is it an, 'I've got cancer and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me' book. It is about the daft and sometimes funny things that happen to people living with cancer and useful tips for making the best of it.'Rachel Bown is a marketing director and single mother of two, who was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer at the age of 45. With a taboo-breaking sense of humour, Rachel shares her experiences and the lists she made to help gain some control over what quickly became an unpredictable life. Both funny and poignant, she vividly describes her battle with cancer and the often absurd situations she finds herself in from a brutally flippant surgeon to her latest fashion accessory, a colostomy bag, to embarking on a project to build a 40ft-banana giraffe on the roof of her house.Bowel cancer is the second-biggest cancer killer in the UK, but there is still a shockingly low level of public awareness about it. Rachel offers you all the nuggets of information she picked up from hundreds of sources along the way, including questions you should ask your surgeon, the best treats whilst on chemo, things to look out for in a blood test, and how not to react when someone tells you they have cancer.