Wendy Schlessel Harpham – författare

“Provides comfort, reassurance, and practical advice . . . The combination of the parent guide and the children’s story . . . is extraordinarily effective.” —Diane Blum, MSW, Executive Director, Cancer Care, Inc.At some point in our lives, many of us will face the crisis of an unexpected illness. For parents, the fear, anxiety and confusion resulting from a cancer diagnosis can be particularly devastating.When a Parent Has Cancer is a book for families written from the heart of experience. A mother, physician, and cancer survivor, Dr. Wendy Harpham offers clear, direct, and sympathetic advice for parents challenged with the task of raising normal, healthy children while they struggle with a potentially life-threatening disease.Dr. Harpham lays the groundwork of her book with specific plans for helping children through the upheaval of a parent’s diagnosis and treatment, remission and recovery, and if necessary, confronting the possibility of death. She emphasizes the importance of being honest with children about the gravity of the illness, while assuring them that their basic needs will always be met.Included is Becky and the Worry Cup, an illustrated children’s book that tells the story of a seven-year-old girl’s experiences with her mother’s cancer.“Both the guidebook and the story are sympathetic, sensitive to intense emotions, and, above all, empowering to parents and children facing the significant changes life-threatening illness demands of a family.” —Booklist“When a Parent Has Cancer reaffirms that life does go on. The book should help give children and their parents a context within which to deal with life after cancer and to ‘find the courage to face the future honestly, with love and hope.’” —Journal of the American Medical Association

This classic work by a physician survivor has helped thousands of cancer patients and their families. Now updated with the latest information on diagnosis and treatment, it provides expanded information and advice that helps Healthy Survivors through the accompanying challenges. New to this edition is the Harpham's Decision Tool, a unique chart for deciding on your best course of treatment. A succinct and empowering book for those diagnosed with any type of cancer, Diagnosis: Cancer covers all the important topics that will help you through these months of turmoil, including information on clinical trials and alternative therapies, as well as how to use the medical system. This book will guide you to act most effectively for the best care, while nourishing hope.

This is the first book written by a doctor for the layperson that addresses the medicine, the practical issues, and the psychosocial elements of recovery after cancer treatment. The author a cancer survivor herself, understands that surviving cancer is more than just killing cancer cells and getting through treatment. Patients must deal with the emotional, social, spiritual, and financial fallout of a cancer diagnosis. By helping survivors understand that they can’t go back to where they were before cancer, she liberates them to move forward to a different, “new normal.” Writing in a reader-friendly, question-and-answer format, Dr. Wendy Harpham addresses a wide range of issues realistically yet hopefully. Among them are understanding the medicine of reevaluation, follow-up, and prevention treatment; dealing with the most common physical aftereffects of treatment; learning how to make decisions about work and school; relating to friends and family; helping children deal with parent’s cancer; and coping with the practicalities of living wills and insurance. An important section on post cancer fatigue will be of special interest to patients who find that exhaustion is one of the most difficult problems with which they deal.