Not just another book on cancer or illness

GILLIAN KLAWANSKY

However, once they start, they are captivated by this searingly honest memoir of four-time cancer survivor.

In her book, Segal strips bare everything she’s been through in her harrowing journey. She reveals how she’s not only survived, but forged a deeper connection to life and to the people she loves.

Delving into what she terms her “metamorphosis from person to patient”, Segal captures the highs, lows, joys and heartaches that come with facing and overcoming four different cancer diagnoses. She takes a topic many shy away from – filled with fear and uncertainty – and weaves a powerful, personal narrative that’s sometimes heart-breaking but always underpinned by hope. In so doing, she’s created an absorbing, beautifully written memoir that’s hard to put down.

Having previously co-authored five non-fiction books – always about other people – Segal turned the spotlight on herself in her memoir, a shift she found liberating albeit somewhat strange in that readers now feel like they know her well.

Putting a very personal experience out for public consumption didn’t happen overnight, though. “I was writing it as a journal all through my treatment and it was definitely for myself initially,” she says. “Then I started sending it as e-mails to my friends about my experience and a lot wrote back and said what a unique insight I’d provided and they suggested I turn it into a book.”

Taking this advice, Segal joined a writing group halfway through her chemo and so her book was born. “I got feverish about writing it and it almost wrote itself after that. It just felt like the story had to be told, there were so many learnings along the way and I was gathering so much information that I felt like I had a lot to share with other people in this situation.”

Segal drew strength from other people’s writing through her treatment and so wrote the book primarily for other cancer patients. In working to break through the fear most people have of cancer, she also had a wider audience in mind though.

“I’ve increasingly found, since the book has been published, that it’s speaking to people on many different levels, not just about cancer, but about surviving very difficult situations that you’re presented with in life. My struggle was about how you find strength, which is something many people confront.”

For Segal, writing was an essential tool in processing her feelings, searching for meaning and coming to terms with her diagnoses and treatments. “It helped me on so many levels. It was a creative outlet when all my creativity was taken away from me through cancer – it removes all your creative choices.

“It was a way of being in touch with my vulnerability and learning how I was feeling. It also helped me to get some measure of control in a world where I had lost so much of that – making order on the page was a way of making order in my life. It also protected my family from a lot of the details of the illness – I didn’t need to impose it on them all of the time.”

Segal’s writing is largely unfiltered. “If you’re going to write a memoir, it has to be authentic, true, vulnerable and open,” she says. “While I know that that openness is an acquired taste for many, for me, it was the only way I could be true to what the experience was. It’s very important that all of us do learn to discuss our vulnerabilities, because I’ve seen now how it helps other people.”

Segal writes about challenges that arose when her son, the then deputy head boy of a Jewish day school, wore a keffiyeh at the opening of the World Debating Championship, creating uproar in the community… all in the midst of her chemo sessions.

“It wasn’t easy to get through – the outside world becomes very challenging when you have to be so inwardly focused through your cancer journey. But I got through it by so many other people standing next to me.

 “When you go through cancer, there’s a kind of club you enter into, we all help each other in whatever way we can, it’s the spirit of being together – a communal relationship we build.”

Her ability to see and investigate the opportunities presented by facing her mortality rather than simply focusing on the fear, is what makes Segal’s story so inspirational.

“I’m an optimistic person by nature, I always have been,” she says. “I was very stymied when I had my third diagnosis but when you have children, a husband and a family, you can’t be defeated. My great quality, I’m learning, is my ability to ask for help and I got a lot of it through my journey!”

While there were times she felt her body wouldn’t make it through, finishing chemo and radiation were the highest highs along her journey. “I felt like I’d run a marathon and I was able to say I’d reached the finish line.”

Married to Discovery Health CEO, Dr Jonny Broomberg, Segal acknowledges the massive advantages she had in getting the best care available, but ultimately no amount of connections can change a cancer diagnosis.

Segal says that while she was lucky to be married to a doctor who wasn’t afraid of medical procedures, there are challenges any couple dealing with cancer encounters.

“You have to bring your partner into that situation as much as you can so they understand what you’re going through. Simultaneously, you have to protect them from the full blown experience, because there’s a limit to what any person can absorb.

“There needs to be a constant negotiation between letting your partner in and protecting them. What’s also important in any marriage, is to communicate your needs all the time.” It’s also important to look to friends and family for times your partner can’t be there.

The overwhelmingly positive response to her book has set Segal on a new course. “It’s one I never anticipated and it’s mainly a journey to understanding how other women in my position don’t enjoy the same resources that I did when I was fighting breast cancer.

“So, I have a strong desire to engage in advocacy work with breast cancer,” she says.

“The fact that so many women still die from this disease is an absolute travesty, they’re dying from a lack of resources.

“Now that there’s publicity around my story, I want to use that as a platform to speak for others who don’t have my privilege. We have to break the lingering shame and silence around breast cancer – the more people that get an understanding of what people go through, the better off we’ll be.”

Reading Segal’s book not only provides this understanding, it also changes the way you look at yourself, your life and the people in it.