Review: Marking time
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 30, 2012
Rachele Baker has assembled this brief Kindle book to share her mother's battle against disease. In 1990 Midge Rylander was diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma, the etiology of this disease being exposure to asbestos whose fibers set up a reaction in the pleural and become carcinomatous in time. The book has an introduction by Baker and closes with the words she offered at her mother's demise in 1992.  The book itself is a journal Midge Rylander kept, along with letters form family, while she battled her terminal illness by herself: after surgical extirpation she decided against chemotherapy and radio therapy, electing to all the last months of her life to be free of medical intervention.The journal is valuable in that it goes through the processes of grieving after a diagnosis of terminal cancer.  Rylander speaks of her true feeling for doctors (not very positive), communicates in detail the pain she feels and the medications she lives on.  The anger, the bitterness progress into a sense of restored self worth and making the most of the time she has left.Books such as this may be difficult reads because of the subject matter, but for patients and families who are searching for some touchstone of coping with the diagnosis of a fatal illness/disease, the book can bring some insights - if for no other reason than it is the daily honest responses of a woman who fights her challenge alone.  Grady Harp December 12