The Cancer Olympics

National Indie Excellence Award Finalist (2016) for Cancer. Pinnacle Book Achievement Award Winner (2016) for Best Inspirational. Feathered Quill Book Awards Silver Medal for Best Inspirational (2016). Book Excellence Award Finalist (2016) for Inspiration. International Book Award Finalist (2015) for Health-Cancer. Readers' Favorite Award Finalist (2015) for Grief-Hardship. USA Best Book Award Finalist (2015) for Health-Cancer. Listed in The 55 Best Self-Published Books of 2015 - Kirkus IndieReader. Diagnosed with a late-stage cancer, after years of bungled and inadequate medical attention...and then to discover that the best-practice chemotherapy is not available in your province. After her delayed diagnosis of colorectal cancer, Robin McGee reaches out to her community using a blog entitled "Robin's Cancer Olympics." Often uplifting and humourous, the blog posts and responses follow her into the harsh landscape of cancer treatment, medical regulation, and provincial politics. If she and her supporters are to be successful in lobbying the government for the chemotherapy, she must overcome many formidable and frightening hurdles. And time is running out. . . A true story, The Cancer Olympics is a suspenseful and poignant treatment of an unthinkable situation, an account of advocacy and survival that explores our deepest values regarding democracy, medicine, and friendship. Half of the proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Canadian Cancer Society and the Colorectal Cancer Association of Canada....

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The Power of More shows readers how to accomplish their goals, big or small, by just doing a little bit more. Whether you are a novice runner who wants to complete a 10k race or an elite athlete after a gold medal, you can achieve your ambition by believing in the importance of doing a little bit more. A three-time Olympic champion, McBean explains the effect of breaking down big goals into manageable bits that you can do, as well as the idea that you almost always have a little bit more to give. She discusses the importance of setting goals, the role of communication and teamwork, and the need for motivation, commitment, and accountability. Finally, she dispels the myth that we should expect to be perfect and stresses that both confidence and success are the result of preparation.

By the time Spud Alford was twenty-one, he had strengthened his athletic skills enough to become a serious contender for the American team at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Fate, however, had a different idea of how the young track and field star should outpace his competition. Four years later, it looked like Alford might finally get his shot. Again, fate intervened, and this time, young Alford confronted a cancer diagnosis. God, If You Are Real…. An Olympic Dream, Cancer Nightmare, and the creation of Finger Football is the heartbreaking, hilarious account of one man who time and again passes the wrong end of the torch, only to rally and rise above his seemingly limitless lot of bad luck. With hope, heart, and humor, this frank and funny account of one man's journey from Olympic hopeful to company leader is certain to inspire readers seeking a refreshing perspective. Anyone who is ready to blaze a trail as an athlete, a businessperson, or as an individual seeking deeper meaning in their days will find plenty to laugh about—and think about—in this rollicking, fast-paced memoir of one life on the skids, with only the help of one lost soul.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Monopolists, the "fascinating" (People) story of Olympian Kevin Hall and the syndrome that makes him believe he stars in a television show of his life. Meet Kevin Hall: brother, son, husband, father, and Olympic sailor. Kevin has an Ivy League degree, a winning smile, and throughout his adult life, he has been engaged in an ongoing battle with a person that doesn't exist to anyone but him: the Director. In the tradition of Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, journalist and NYT bestselling author Mary Pilon's The Kevin Show reveals the many-sided struggle--of Kevin, his family, and the medical profession--to understand and treat a psychiatric disorder whose euphoric highs and creative ties to pop culture have become inextricable from Kevin's experience of himself. Kevin suffers from what doctors are beginning to call the "Truman Show" delusion, a form of bipolar disorder named for the 1998 movie in which the main character realizes he is the star of a reality TV show. When the Director commands Kevin to do things, the results often lead to handcuffs, hospitalization, or both. Once he nearly drove a car into Boston Harbor. His girlfriend, now wife, was in the passenger seat. Interweaving Kevin's perspective--including excerpts from his journals and sketches--with police reports, medical records, and interviews with those who were present at key moments in his life, The Kevin Show is a bracing, suspenseful, and eye-opening view of the role that mental health plays in a seemingly ordinary life.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Choosing Hope: One Woman. Three Cancers. is the story of how the author battled three advanced cancers: Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, Stage 3 Multiple Myeloma, and Stage 3 Breast Cancer within a period of five years. It is an inspirational story about resilience and hope in the face of overwhelming odds in the face of death. The book is written as a series of anecdotes, based on entries from a blog the author started shortly her first diagnosis, when her focus was simply on surviving. The blog was her way of exploring and sharing what was happening to her in real time; it describes moments of utter darkness and light, of hopelessness and hope, of intense pain and then relief. It provided a venue for the author-patient to connect with other people, and to support other individuals who were diagnosed with cancer. Choosing Hope captures the psychological, physical, and emotional impacts of a cancer diagnosis and treatment. It is easy to read and anecdotal in style, moving and yet full of the humour that helped the author to get through. This book will appeal to recently diagnosed cancer patients and survivors and their families, as well as caregivers, and to others facing health challenges.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION "The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." —Sally Rooney, author of Normal People "Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations