Between Me and the River: Living Beyond Cancer: A Memoir

By Carrie Host

Book Overview

Carrie Host knows that the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness takes a split second to change your life, as well as the lives of your partner, parents, children and all who love you. Packed with inspiration, advice, comfort and hope, Between Me and the River is Host's candid and uplifting memoir of how she found the strength and fortitude to triumph over a rare form of cancer, and craft a new and meaningful life. When told at forty, with her youngest child just ten months old, that she had carcinoid tumor, Host felt as if she'd been hurled into a raging river, stripped of all forms of potential rescue. The voyage of this strong-minded, openhearted woman out of that river and onto safe shores is told with uncompromising honesty and respect for the miracles that medicine and love can work. While dealing with practical issues such as how to find the best medical team and what to tell the children, Host also recounts the many spiritual and eye-opening lessons that made her journey so bearable: how to see what is available rather than what is absent, how to free up energy to heal by letting go of anger and fear, and how to believe in the future. Host's unquenchable sense of humor in the midst of suffering creates poignant moments of laughter through tears. Bracing, lyrical and deeply moving, Between Me and the River is a tribute to one life, and all lives, rerouted by illness. This remarkably honest book provides a deep sense of insight and understanding for survivors, caregivers, family members and friends.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0373892144
• ISBN13: 9780373892143
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Harlequin Nonfiction
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.1" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

Ins[iring!

I chose this book to hoping it would offer some insight into dealing with an illness in our family. This is a wondeful book. One feels the pain,frustration and love through out this book. A young woman's a story of a long hard journey. We all can benefit from this book. Highly recommend. It will make you a stronger person and more compassionate of those facing such a journey. It will give you courage and spunk!

Between Me and the River

I gave this book to my sister who is currently being treated for colon cancer. She told me that the book is very well written and that she can identify with many things that are covered in the book about living with cancer. She said that the book gave her support and understanding.

LOVE, LOVE THIS BOOK!!! OPRAH'S NEXT BOOK CLUB PICK

This is a book that I could not put down until I finished. As a person, who has lost family members to CANCER, the author's words were soothing, touching, and what an insight on what someone with that disease does to protect their family. Carrie Host's style of writing has such an ease and flow about it. Many tears were shed reading this book but there was so much more HOPE than SADNESS. Do I believe this book should be the next book on Oprah's Book Club? Of course, I do. This is an unbelievable, well-written, touching story by an author, who is beautiful inside and out and has touched so many lives.

Amazing Lesson in How to Value Life and a Beautiful Love Story

I am an oncology nurse and this is simply the best book about surviving, coping and recovering from cancer that I have ever read. This book is so beautifully written and so amazingly accurate and insightful. I wept throughout the whole thing. It covers so many of the emotions that my patients have expressed to me over the years, and it is exactly how I know I would feel if I were in the author's shoes. It is outstanding. I have read so many cancer books with the hope of finding the perfect book to give to my patients, but always find them lacking something. This book is perfect. I loved the "summary" of the lesson learned at the end of most of the chapters. I have read excerpts from this book to two of my support groups this week to promote discussion and it has already touched the cancer survivors in those groups. I can only imagine the impact that this book will not only have on cancer survivors and their families, but also on oncology nurses and doctors who read it. This is a must read for any oncology nurse who truly wants to empathize with his/her patients, and all medical students need to be forced to read it to remind them of the emotional toll the cancer journey takes on someone, and to remind them that they are dealing with human beings and not just a cancer "diagnosis". This book truly touched me. The part where she describes looking in on her children while they slept before she heads to The Mayo Clinic, not knowing if she would see them again, made me sob. The way she wrote about her baby, her amazing husband, sisters...unbelievably beautiful and loving. The part about her mother wishing she could take her daughter's cancer from her and the whole mother daughter bond....heart wrenching. So perfectly accurate the way she describes the friends who stay and the friends who don't. I can't tell you how many times I have heard this and have seen this when working with cancer patients/survivors. A perfect description of the overwhelming fatigue that cancer survivors feel. I have no doubt that this book will be hugely successful and if Oprah doesn't pick it for her book club she is insane. But the most important legacy that it will have is with the thousands of cancer survivors who will totally be able to identify with it and will feel less alone after reading it. This is a beautiful book and an amazing lesson in how to value life. Cancer survivors know what is truly important in life and are so much wiser and more powerful than we mere mortals without cancer. This book captures that perfectly. For those without cancer in their lives, I also suggest this book, as there is a truly beautiful love story woven into the pages between the author and her husband. Not a romance novel love story, but a story of a true and strong love that is tested through the worst of times and not only survives but is victorious. I would like to thank the author for sharing this stunning book with us and wish her many years of "NED" ("no evidence of