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    Between Me and the River: Living Beyond Cancer: A Memoir
    Between Me and the River: Living Beyond Cancer: A Memoir
    Between Me and the River: Living Beyond Cancer: A Memoir
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Written by Carrie Host

    Narrated by Renee Raudman

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Carrie Host has given us a book on how to believe in the future-a future Host visualizes as a painting made up of a multitude of tiny dots called "right now."

    An intensely intimate journey into the unseen and unspoken aspects of catastrophic illness, told from the determined viewpoint of a forty-year-old stay-at-home mother of three. Packed with inspiration, advice, comfort and hope, Between Me and the River is Host's candid and uplifting love story of how she found the strength and fortitude to triumph over adversity.

    When told at forty, with her youngest child only ten months old, that she had carcinoid tumor, Host felt she had been hurled into a raging river, stripped of all forms of potential rescue. The voyage of this strong-minded, open-hearted 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 her children, Host experienced many spiritual and eye-opening lessons: How to forgive and how to cherish. 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.

    Host's unquenchable sense of humor in the midst of suffering creates poignant moments of laughter through tears. Her book conveys an enormously deep sense of understanding and ultimately delivers acceptance and peace. She offers an "emotional nightlight" for cancer patients in their time of greatest need-perspective for the soul.

    Bracing, lyrical and deeply moving, Between Me and the River is a tribute to one life and all lives. This is a beautifully written book for survivors, caregivers, family members, and friends.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9781400183234
    Between Me and the River: Living Beyond Cancer: A Memoir

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    Reviews for Between Me and the River

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    • 5/5
      Few of us are well-versed in what it takes to save our own lives. Carrie Host is.Between Me and the River is a heartbreaking, glorious, and poetic rendering that spans several years of a young woman’s life during which her body is ravaged by a slow-growing but deadly form of cancer. It is also the story of a woman saved by her inner resources, and the buoying love of her husband and three children. In Between Me and the River, Host intimately describes her battles and triumphs in nail-biting detail. While difficult to read at times, Host’s cut to the quick candor keeps the reader engaged as she takes us on a journey into the labyrinth of the medical system, as she rebuilds her body, brick by metaphorical brick, only to have it ravaged again. Her lyrical descriptions provide a reprieve from the harsh realities of a life forever on the “river” – a metaphor that she uses for her cancer. At once poet and realist, Host’s struggle to make peace with her disease provides a compelling narrative that propels the reader to turn the book’s pages with care, hanging on to Host’s voice as though it’s a life raft through the unknown rapid waters she so bravely navigates, even when it appears she will drown. Yet, through it all, one has the feeling she’s got her eyes set on the horizon, far enough in the distance to see herself across the river.Sometimes the river is torrid. Sometimes it stops moving completely. Emboldened with a fighting spirit even as her 5’7′ body drops from a healthy 135 to a haunting 97 pounds, rendering her unable to hold her head up let alone hold a new baby, the future looks bleak. But treatment after treatment, she fights and holds on, wrestling with her own spirituality and drawing epiphanies about herself and her relationships – the sort that come from the deepest depths of despair – that bless her with an uncommon peace that only those who have visited death’s door can intimately understand.Host navigates the river as she enters into complicated dialogues with friends, her children, and her husband, all of whom, at times, she believes she may never see again. She describes the desperation and frustration she feels when hiring someone to care for her children, to do the things she is supposed to be doing as she feels herself falling into a shadow of her former self when cancer seems to be winning. This is a story that shakes the reader to the core, one not for the faint of heart, but certainly a worthy one. Host, caught in the middle of a glorious life, could have been any one of us… yet, she is no longer like us. She is different, as only a woman can be when she has touched death’s door and returned with as many scars as gifts. This book teaches us powerful lessons about love, letting go, and forgiveness, about the quest for health and the fight to survive, about savoring every small moment with the same enthusiasm and appreciation as all the grand moments put together. In the end, it is Host’s determination and wisdom that bring her back fighting. Hers is a voice not easily forgotten, one that makes a reader wish her many more healthy years, for surely she has many more gifts to share with us.
    • 3/5
      Carrie Host wasn't even forty and her youngest child was still a baby when she got the news that would change her whole family's life. She had carcinoid tumors throughout her abdomen and on her lungs. And this particular type of rare cancer doesn't respond well to radiation or chemotherapy. Her odds of survival were quite low but she wasn't going to give up without a fight. This memoir is her tale of the terrible journey that cancer took her on, the treatments she underwent, and the toll it took not only on her but on her family as well. It is the powerful story of an awful ordeal. An emotional tale, as you would expect the memoir of a woman ravaged by cancer and taken to the brink and back, there are also moments of humor interspersed with the bleakness. And the emotional insights that Host offers are honest, revealing, and probably quite helpful both for families and for individuals facing a cancer diagnosis.Host pulls no punches in detailing the ravages that her body experienced. She confronts the heartbreak of her baby not knowing who she was after one extended stretch of time at the Mayo Clinic. And she is candid about the effect her cancer diagnosis had on her friendships, watching some friends drift away right when she needed normalcy the most. She was incredibly lucky in her family relationships and in her financial situation as both of these enabled her to search for the best, most cutting edge treatment and afforded her the time to pursue it.In the book, Host has chosen the extended metaphor of cancer as a river, alternately raging to pull her under, deceptively calm, or quietly flowing along. Initially this extended metaphor worked but it eventually became intrusive and overly used without a hint of subtlety. In her initial chapters, she hadn't quite settled on the metaphor she wanted to use and used many different ones, which caused a small bit annoyance on my part as this should have been cleaned up in the editing process. Once she settled into her narrative and focused on the narrative itself, her story became more compelling and moving. It didn't really need the current of the river to carry the reader along. And as a registered grump, I have to mention that the grammatically incorrect title drives me batty. A totally personal reaction, I'm sure, but one I cannot help nor one which I can ignore. An emotional read, this needed tighter editing and excising but was ultimately a fine read.