Feisty Womans Breast Cancer Book or Trust Your Body Trust Your Baby

Feisty Woman's Breast Cancer Book

Author: Elaine Ratner

Breaking down the taboos associated with breast cancer and its treatment, Ratner offers women hope that they can survive and come out whole. She also shares 18 insights gleaned from her own experience with breast cancer. Published to coincide with Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Publishers Weekly

A woman with an immensely positive attitude, Ratner, a Berkeley, Calif.-based editor and writer, offers this guide to the psychological and emotional aspects of breast cancer. Ratner describes her own encounter with the disease in 1995, when, at age 51, she found two lumps that were later diagnosed as malignant. The experience led her to challenge prevailing myths about breasts and women's self-image, and to assert her right to make decisions about her own body. She urges women to take time to learn about their treatment options, to find a doctor they can trust, to have confidence in their own decisions--and to expect a good outcome. She especially counsels sharing thoughts and feelings with family, friends and even one's children. Her own experience was indeed a positive one: four years after cancer, she is healthy and happy, and she reminds women that the great majority of those with breast cancer will, like her, recover. Never saccharine, and often adamant (she argues that women shouldn't let doctors convince them to have breast reconstruction on grounds that they would be incomplete without it), Ratner delivers an upbeat message about assertiveness, strength and positive thinking. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Ratner, a freelance author who battled breast cancer several years ago, here offers a new and controversial approach to the disease. Recovery, she argues, requires a positive outlook. She describes how to foster a post-diagnosis zest for life and stresses the importance of the mind-body connection. Ratner's opinions are sometimes controversial: "A breast," she writes, explaining her decision to forgo breast reconstruction after her mastectomy, "is completely expendable." But she also writes eloquently about her fear of the side effects of radiation, chemotherapy, and the drug Tamoxifen and her decision to refuse these traditional treatments (a decision that worked for her but might not be right for all breast cancer patients). While not taking the place of standard breast cancer treatment guides, this book does offer breast cancer survivors information about enhancing their emotional health--after a treatment decision has been made. Recommended for public libraries only.--Cynthia A. Nuhn, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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Trust Your Body! Trust Your Baby!: Childbirth Wisdom and Cesarean Prevention

Author: Andrea Frank Henkart

Includes a chapter by Dr. John Gray, author of the best-selling, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Henkart and her collaborators inform women about the current realities of childbirth in America. They provide the reader with facts, figures, cesarean prevention techniques, and alternative approaches to the aggressive routines used by the medical profession today. The technology that "saves" many mothers and babies in childbirth is the same technology that robs many women of their right to birth naturally. Consequently, of the one million cesarean sections that will be performed in America next year, over half will be unnecessary. Women deserve to be informed about the realities of childbirth. They deserve to be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and to trust the miracle of birth. It is through their conscious, educated choices that our children will be allowed a peaceful and natural beginning in life.