Breast Cancer? Let Me Check My Schedule!: Ten Remarkable Women Meet the Challenge of Fitting Breast Cancer Into Their Very Busy Lives

This book addressed one of the primary issues for me, as a newly diagnosed cancer survivor - how to keep up with my job while still taking the time needed for medical treatments and recuperation. The book focuses on ten fairly high-powered women with executive and professional jobs, but the preface notes that nowadays most mid-life women are working outside the home and have to balance work responsibilities with their personal needs. Many of us are single and self-supporting; employer-provided health insurance is essential to cover the considerable costs of treatment. So this book helped to answer my overwhelming need to know how to communicate with people at work and how to balance my work schedule with the time I needed to deal with the cancer. Some of the technical information in the book is a little outdated, since the experience of some of the women went back into the 1980s and the book itself came out in 1997. However, I found the book enormously useful in addressing the work-related issues that often are given little attention in other cancer books I've read.

From the foreword written by Erma Bombeck:I do not know nor have I ever met the ten women who authored this book.But we share a common bond. All of us were watching our prime-time lives pass by when a voice announced, "We interrupt this life to bring you cancer." We didn't even have time to turn the dial.I have read a hundred books on breast cancer - war stories of women who did battle with the most frightening adversary in their lives. But BREAST CANCER? LET ME CHECK MY SCHEDULE! is different. These are personal stories of ten women, all over thirty, who pursue careers outside their homes......the way they accepted their diagnosis, the decision sthey made, their approach to therapy and the way they coped all reflected their experience in the workplace.I wanted to be part of this book mostly because of its title. It fits me to a "T." I too am a working woman complete with a little calendar that tells me when to have a headache. If it isn't penciled in, I don't have one. On April 23, 1992 under "Things to Do Today" I jotted down, "radical mastectomy, noon." .........As I read this book, I was hoping it would address the one emotion that all cancer patients rarely speak about: the uncertainty of our future. It did. We are a unique group who have been allowed to face our mortality, and oddly enough, it has made us better people for it. There isn't a survivor who doesn't admit she has changed. ........I've heard women say, "I can't read cancer books. They're downers. BREAST CANCER? LET ME CHECK MY SCHEDULE is not a downer. How could it be when you enter the lives of these ten women who triumph over an invasion of their bodies. These are women with drive and purpose who aren't ready to give up. Cancer? It's a full week. I'll have my people call your people and set something up.

This is a concept book, as you might guess from the title. I didn't much care for the concept.Ten busy professional women, all initially diagnosed with Stage I or II breast cancer, were invited by McCarthy Medical Marketing and Innovative Medical Education Consortium, Inc. to form a focus group that would help to foreground the needs of their special category - busy professional women with breast cancer - for the edification of medical personnel and other cancer care providers. The resulting book, put together in-house by MMM and IMEC, "is intended to provide health-care professionals with insight into what makes this group of women 'different' and, in turn, to enhance their relationships with them." And how are these women "different?" The book explains, "For all ten authors, the diagnosis of breast cancer was a major inconvenience because...it interrupted their busy, active, and fulfilled lives." It turns out none of them felt comfortable crying in doctor's offices or losing control. Nor enjoyed the disagreeable task of "comforting distraught well-wishers" such as their friends and extended family. Nor - back to the title - easily found time for treatment and other medical visits. Why, one woman had the unimaginable experience of being put on hold 15 minutes for her lab results! Whew, what a relief that the rest of us don't have any of that to worry about. As the book progresses and this offensive start-off impression recedes into the background, the characters become more sympathetic and their medical and professional fates interesting. So I'm inclined to hope that these 10 authors didn't quite anticipate how the final draft would make them look. Every woman who has breast cancer has a right to our sympathy and concern. That goes for busy professionals too. Will appeal to: Obsessive fact-gatherers trying to assess their options and eager to learn what happened to other people with a similar lifestyle.