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If you or a loved one are facing cancer, this small but powerful book will help you!

This is all about life, hope and the choices you’ll need to make in order to survive. This is about the human part of having cancer. Of entering that long night of doubt, fear, a sense of mortality, loss of personal control – and finally finding the faith & spirit to reach the dawn of the rest of your life.

If you or a loved one are facing cancer, this small but powerful book will help you immensely. From a long term cancer servivor, get the honest but hopeful truth about how you can win your war against this disease.

Know that you can win. Know that you can live.

This is not any sort of medical writing, though this book, like you & I, can’t hope to escape all the medical aspects our lives take on for the duration of the struggle. This is all about life, hope and the choices you’ll need to make in order to survive. This is about the human part of having cancer. Of entering that long night of doubt, fear, a sense of mortality, loss of personal control – and finally finding the faith & spirit to reach the dawn of the rest of your life.

While there is breath there is life,
and while there is life there is hope.

For those who want to get the benefits of “Been There, Done That Cancer Thing …and so can you” without actually having to crack open a book, we also offer this Audio CD, read by the author himself.

In a very real sense, it’s even more personal than the printed book. It’s a professionally, studio recorded work which allows the author to speak directly with you. It’s literally his voice of experience. You gain by the nuance which speech provides and the written word simply cannot. Each of the book’s bite-sized chapters are individual tracks on the CD, so you can go directly to any given section to listen again and again, if you wish.

Excerpt from the book / Audio sample from CD

When cancer springs up inside of you, suddenly your life has never been more your own, while at the same time, never more at the mercy of those around you.

You’re living inside your physical structure, moving around in this body which suddenly has turned on you. Where you once might have defined yourself by that very same body – how you looked and how you felt: “Uh-oh, a few gray hairs and wrinkles”, you can now parse your existence between it and you. The you is something else, you discover. There is an intensity and immediacy to life which you’ve probably never before experienced.

On Richard's wall calender, I saw the phrase "The time is always now." And it is.

When you feel your life is being measured (in years, weeks, days?) and the potential for its end is all too obvious, each moment gains an import which it never had before when the supply of those years seemed endless. You want to live in each moment and live out each moment and do those things you only considered before and say those things which you always self-edited before.

Many years ago, a man who was captivated with objects of antiquity happened upon seven little suits of armor in an old shop. Now, these weren’t cheesy plastic toys. These were centuries-old miniature steel versions of the actual armor which ancient knights would have worn during battle and for ceremonial occasions. These were intricate, authentic samples which an armorer had used during the middle ages in order to show his wares and drum up business. One of these alone would have been a true find, but this grouping of seven was rare and valuable!

The man who saw them in the shop was not well heeled. Indeed, he had to watch every dollar while providing for his family with its growing brood of kids. So he held off getting those seven little suits of armor, even though he wanted them more than anything else at the moment. He went home and spoke with his wife and they discussed it long into the night. Finally, they agreed that yes, he could have the seven little suits of armor if they scrimped and scraped their money for a while to catch up.

The next day, the man hurried back to the old shop, only to discover that the suits of armor had just been sold to someone else. They were gone. He’d lost his opportunity, and never found those seven little suits of armor again.

Don’t let precious moments and opportunities pass you by, because you can’t go back and live life again. Create the opportunities you can and grab hold of the ones which simply seem to come your way.

Life is too short has real meaning now, like it never did in the past. Our moments of life disappear literally in a heartbeat, one after the other, after the other. And the opportunities of each moment disappear with them. Don’t let them escape without a fight!

It's an odd pairing of opposites, but only when faced mose baldly with death do you learn to truly value and live your life.