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Reviews tagging 'Cancer'
This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown by Taylor Harris
2 reviews
fkshg8465's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
A little bittersweet, but mostly sweet. What a special family with three beautiful children. Glad they were able to keep advocating for themselves through the systemic racism that is our medical machine. Also glad they found peace even though they still seek answers. Something tells me they are all going to be ok.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer, Medical trauma, and Racism
okiecozyreader's review against another edition
emotional
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Mother Taylor Harris discusses, the boy she and her husband made, Tophs (from Christopher). Until he was about 2, he seemed healthy. After a series of blood sugar issues, learning struggles and eventually seizures, his mother (parents) worked to get the best care and diagnosis for their son. Between medical issues, she remembers how they met, issues she dealt with in her own childhood - like anxiety - and how this process examined their own complete medical analysis - genetics work for her, her husband and her child. I loved how she balanced it with her perspective on faith.
“Thank you, God, for creating us. Instead of putting us on pages and making us a show, you made us come to life. —Tophs’s bedtime prayer” dedication
“We came to the geneticist’s office because doctors referred us. We came because this appointment, like the others, was typed into our family Google calendar with an alert. But we came with a primal need: we were two parents looking for the very boy we’d brought with us.” Ch 13
““We are never more in touch with life than when life is painful, never more in touch with hope than we are then,” wrote Frederick Buechner. “ Ch 22
“mitral valve prolapse or as common as a hernia. The relief would come in having a possible path to follow, a community to join with—not necessarily in carrying a lighter load. It’s quite possible that living in the liminal space between symptoms and answers has offered me too much loneliness, yes, but also space to breathe, distance from the settled grief of knowing.” Ch 25
“Thank you, God, for creating us. Instead of putting us on pages and making us a show, you made us come to life. —Tophs’s bedtime prayer” dedication
“We came to the geneticist’s office because doctors referred us. We came because this appointment, like the others, was typed into our family Google calendar with an alert. But we came with a primal need: we were two parents looking for the very boy we’d brought with us.” Ch 13
““We are never more in touch with life than when life is painful, never more in touch with hope than we are then,” wrote Frederick Buechner. “ Ch 22
“mitral valve prolapse or as common as a hernia. The relief would come in having a possible path to follow, a community to join with—not necessarily in carrying a lighter load. It’s quite possible that living in the liminal space between symptoms and answers has offered me too much loneliness, yes, but also space to breathe, distance from the settled grief of knowing.” Ch 25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness
Moderate: Cancer, Mental illness, and Blood
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