Coming Home from Breast Cancerville by Liz Van Vliet

This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced breast cancer or knows someone who has. On the one hand it's an easy read, Liz's writing is engaging and at times laugh-out-loud funny, on the other, it's a difficult read. A lesson for me was that empathy comes at a price (I now know stuff about cancer I kind of wish I didn't). Liz is brutally honest about the impact breast cancer has had on her life and the lives of her husband and three girls.

Using her childhood road trips with parents and four siblings in a VW Kombi van as a metaphor, Liz explains the three stages of her journey: treatment highway, recovery highway and survivor highway. She talks about the impact on her physical health, on her mental health, on her marriage, on her family and on her finances and career. It took her a long time to realise her journey was not going to be a round-trip. She has gradually come to accept, and even embrace, the fact that she will never be the same person she was before the breast cancer.

If there's one thing I think people should take away from the book, it's the need for free ongoing counselling not just for the patient but also for their immediate family. It had never occured to me that people who survive cancer might suffer from PTSD as a result of their experience, or that their whole family might.

If you want to reach out to someone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer I suggest you buy this book, read it yourself and then send them a copy.