Winning the Chemo Battle

Dear Reader,


Winning the Chemo Battle is a personal account of chemotherapy. If you have had chemotherapy, you will recognize the “truth” in the book, even though your own may be different. If you are about to have chemotherapy, or if a friend or relative or spouse is about to have chemo, you will get an idea of what it’s like to go through this treatment by reading about someone else. 


Even though this story is about one person, when we think about it, no one takes chemotherapy alone. If you have children, you will be eager to explain to them as much about cancer and crisis and death and living as well as you can. Regardless of the age of your children, you will want to reach out to them and help them understand the implications of cancer in their own family. On the other side of you, you have parents and relatives who have had cancer or other life-threatening diseases, so when you think about where you come from, you realize the kinds of feelings and expectations that your own family history brings to you.


And then, of course, you have a spouse or good friends: your peers who want to be working this crisis out with you. They worry a lot about you, but also worry about themselves and how they would handle a life-threatening disease. Your peers wonder how they would do with a horrendous treatment like chemotherapy, as they watch you go through it.


You are not alone in chemotherapy. You bring a younger generation and an older generation and your peers with you. They all see you differently, will have needs and expectations different from yours, and will give you different kinds of support. 


The goal of Winning the Chemo Battle is to help you plan and work toward your own quality of life. In other words, the purpose of this book is for you to see creative ways to make the best of what is...even with cancer and the possibility of a shorter life.


Yours with hope,

Joyce Slayton Mitchell (1984)


Here is the only breast cancer book by a "woman on the street," not a celebrity, not a doctor or nurse, not someone thanking their spouse or partner without whom they would never have survived, but one of the thousands of divorced moms with two teenagers in college dealing with breast cancer. This book will be of immense value to cancer patients and their families who have undergone or who are going into chemotherapy. It provides the information and inspiration on coping with a treatment, whose side effects can be as devastating as the disease it is meant to cure. You will laugh out loud and cry along with Joyce Slayton Mitchell for every little vignette and imagined outcome that she describes! (2013)