The Cancer Diaries

What happens when the wife of a prize-winning poet develops breast cancer? When her biopsy results came back, Kate Lantry sat her husband down and made a serious request. "I want you to document this cancer journey. I want you to go back to writing a poem every day. I want you to write about exactly what happens, as accurately as you can. Don't leave anything out." He told her he had covid fog, and could barely think, much less write. She said, 'If I can face all this again, you can write a few poems.' He told her he would.

He hadn't yet heard the phrase 'tell your story of how you overcame everything, and it will become someone else's survival guide.' He didn't know how much these poems would mean to others as he posted them on social media, day by day. Women who had gone through similar trials, spouses who loved them, family members who had lost their mothers, daughters, and wives. As time went on, new people wrote him, people who had been newly diagnosed, and who were terrified, but they said that if Kate could go through this, so could they, and her story gave them courage to face what had to be done.

And so he wrote, day by day, poem by poem. He documented their lives, their garden, their daily walks in the park, and all aspects of her treatment journey, as they entered the unfamiliar world of biopsies and ultrasounds, of Chemo and immunotherapy, of surgery and proton radiation. This volume, Book One, begins the story in April, the time of her diagnosis, through the end of June, when Chemo had to be paused.
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