In Sickness & in Health: A Love Story

Very informative, well written in a clear and easy to read style.Women who are into touchy feely relationship stuff will like this book. I did even though I am a guy.

This book is simply wonderful--moving, funny, uncompromisingly intimate and honest. The author has revealed her inner self to the reader--with all the ups and downs of real life. As characters in the book, the husband and wife pass through stages in which they evolve and reach a higher level of perception of the other. It reads like a novel, only better, because there are no pat answers and formulaic denouements in what is simply a story about the demands the realities of life make on two intelligent, sensitive and mature adults. This book is meaningful not only for prostate cancer survivors but for so many of us who are going through the changes aging makes in us and in the ways we relate to one another.

I have been somewhat deprived of reading time for the last five years--I have a young child, mortgage, aging parents, demanding career, expensive tastes and so forth. But after reading the first few pages--the first scene, I became dazzled with the way it was written and did not stop until I finished. Though it deals with illness and serious loss, it reads as an adventure novel and entrances you with its dynamic cinematic style. Extreme dificulties provide the matrix for the story--but that matrix rests on a soft cushion of human warmth and life's conditions--things we can all relate to. The personal honesty of the presentation lets you see yourself within such circumstances. It leaves a glimmer of hope that should such tragedy befall you, through reading this book, you might have learned to have the grace, sparkling insight and clarity of thought to experience your own life as richly as this story is told.

With both lyricism and candor, Karen Propp has written a remarkable book about love shadowed by danger - in this case her husband's battle with prostate cancer. When Karen and Sam first meet, they are old enough and sensible enough not to have many illusions, but neither is prepared for his diagnosis. The treatments leave both devastated, but despite the grim facts of living with recurrent cancer, their love for each other keeps them together. This book is indeed, as the subtitle proclaims, a love story. It is also a story of survival, not, as one might expect, for Sam, but for Propp. The obvious recommendation would be for women whose husbands suffer from prostate cancer because Propp supplies details on the controversy of various treatments, of impotency, of therapy and support groups, of learning to live with a spouse forever changed, of raising a child in a house of illness. However, Propp's examination of the interior of her marriage makes for compelling reading for a general readership. In Sickness & In Health should be required reading for all couples grappling with illness in the family. Even those untouched as yet by such a crisis will find the poignant examination of love and the stubborn will to survive a reason to read this book.