          |
Beautifully written — what else would you expect from a poet? — and incredibly helpful. Victoria Hallerman has a marvelous eye for the offbeat detail and an excellent grasp of how a man and his spouse can best cope with the disease, its treatments, and its aftermath.
—Marc Silver, author of Breast Cancer Husband and Success With Heart Failure
Victoria is a poet, teacher, and health
activist. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, and
is featured in the permanent archive of The Academy of American Poets.
She has published extensively in literary magazines (a regular contributor
to Poetry), and her book of poems, The Aerialist, won
the Bright Hill Prize. She is a co-editor of Heliotrope,
a Journal of Poetry. For more about Victoria the poet, click
here >
As a result of her husband's cancer, she became a member of Man to Man,
the national prostate cancer support network and co-founder of What About
Me?, a support group for partners of cancer patients and survivors. How
We Survived Prostate Cancer: What we did and what we should have done
began as a journal of her experience of prostate cancer from the partner's
perspective. She and her husband Dean — a full partner in the book
whose voice appears throughout — have been married since 1969. They
live in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City.
Excerpt
From the Book:
Surviving Prostate Cancer
“This book began as a journal to save my wits. It
developed into a memoir lamenting the lack of comprehensible information
afforded to many patients by modern medicine, and has morphed at last
into a cautionary tale regretting the many errors we made as patient and
partner. My friend and adviser, Elaine Albert, nurse and trained group
facilitator, recently observed, ‘But you and Dean did everything
wrong!’ We did. We never got a second or third opinion. We shopped
for medicine the way some people shop for expensive shoes—going
to the ‘best’ places — and we were disastrously ignorant
of treatment aftereffects.”
Continue >