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About 6 months ago, I was forced to deal with something, that I don't think I was mentally ready for. My high school sweetheart, and girlfriend of nearly 4 years, prior to my marriage, who I had recently come back in touch with and started dating, was diagnosed with breast cancer. At just 22 years old, she was far too young for this. The doctors even felt like she had gotten something that is generally believed to affect women in their 30's and 40's more than anything. So for her to have it so horribly young beat all of the odds, and just went on to show the importance of checking.

Rather than ditching out on her, the woman that I had loved and cared about more than anyone for so long, I decided that I had to stick by her side, hold her hand through all of the pain, and try to make her smile, when there was really nothing to smile about. She had flown out to Alaska to be with me, I was all that she had, so I needed to be strong, not just for herself, but for me as well.

During this time I started devouring all of the information that I could about the topic. I bought countless books in an attempt to educate myself so that I would be able to understand the true reality of what was going on. I wasn't just going to sit idle and let the doctors fill my head with a bunch of filter garbage, just to make me feel better. I wanted to know the reality, and to truly understand it, I had to make myself a more knowing individual, SO I DID.

One of the books that I purchased during this time was Breast Cancer Husband, by Marc Silver. I had heard a lot of good things about the book from the Hospice nurse who had stopped by from time to time to help me cope with a lot of the issues of cancer and to help me to better understand what was going on in terms that I could relate to, rather than the doctor speak that I was being blasted with.

About the Author
from breastcancerhusband.com
A native of Baltimore and a graduate of the University of Maryland, I have been a reporter for over 30 years. I began my journalism career at the Baltimore Jewish Times and became editor of the National Jewish Monthly in 1981. At the Jewish Monthly, I won awards for excellence in North American Jewish journalism for an account of families facing Tay-Sachs disease (both my wife, Marsha, and I carry the Tay-Sachs gene) and for coverage of the first American gathering of Holocaust survivors. I joined the News You Can Use staff at U.S. News & World Report in 1989, writing about health, education, travel, books,

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