1. My Life Without Me: This is a story about a young working mother named Ann with two daughters and a husband. She lives with her family in a tiny trailer in her mother's backyard. After she collapses one day she goes to the doctor who gives her grave news. She tells no one. Ann's emotional journey leads her to unexpected places and gives her life new meaning: the tender moments, the volatile emotions she must keep inside, the recognition that she has the power to understand, examine and fully live her own life.
2. Sweet November: Each month free-spirited Sara starts a new relationship. her task is to take a month to make one man become a better person, and then she moves on. While November rolls around and Sara targets a busy Tycoon, she does not plan on falling in love. But they do, and as a result, Nelson learns the painful secret behind the brevity of Sara's romances.
3. The Family Stone: A comedy with heart. This story is about an annual holiday gathering of an unconventional New England family. Before the holidays are done, relationships will unravel while new ones are formed, secrets will be revealed and the Stone family will come together though its extraordinary capacity for love.
4. The Doctor: Jack is a doctor with it all. He is then diagnosed with throat cancer. Now that he has seen medicine, hospitals, and doctors from the patient's perspective, he realizes there is more to being a doctor than surgery and prescriptions.
5. Fine Things: Bernie Fine, a is a home loving New Yorker. One day, while walking the floors he meets Jane, a little girl who has lost her mother. When they find her mother, Liz, Bernie is enchanted with her and they become involved and eventually marry. Liz becomes pregnant, but their joy is short lived as after their son, Alexander, is born Liz is diagnosed with Leukemia.
6. Wit: This is a story about a women receiving treatment for ovarian cancer. She is in the hospital bed showing what life is like for a cancer patient, most likely going to die from her disease, to hold on to her wit.
7. Stepmom: Jackie and Isabel have nothing in common--one is the ideal mother, the other is struggling to be any kind of mother--until circumstances force them to share a family and put aside their mutual hostility for the sake of the children. They discover how precious life, love and the ties that bind them really are in this tale about the intricate circumstances surrounding what happens when a man's new wife learns from his former wife that she is terminally ill with cancer.
   

Last week, I watched actress Emma Thompson portray with real power a life derailed by cancer in the 2001 HBO screen adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Wit by Margaret Edson.

I watched the movie, on DVD and in the privacy of my own home, almost six years after it was released -- and two years after my own cancer derailment. I like the order in which it all happened -- having cancer and then watching the movie, rather than watching the movie and then having cancer.

Thompson's portrayal of Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., professor of 17th-century English poetry, and expert on the sonnets of John Donne, was entirely real -- so real I sometimes felt I was reliving my own journey with cancer.

The cold, impersonal delivery of Bearing's treatment plan -- eight high-dose, experimental chemotherapy treatments taken over the course of eight months for stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, an aggressive and advanced form -- reminded me of the matter-of-fact manner in which doctors speak to patients, the manner in which my own oncologist spoke to me, void of compassion and warmth and concern.

The on-going sterile and clinical interactions Bearing encounters from doctors, technicians, nurses, and medical students allowed me to appreciate the very few caring souls who crossed my medical path.

Bearing resolves to become a scholar on cancer, just as she has on Donne. And while I am no Ph.D. scholar, I did study cancer, sometimes to a fault, in order to acquire some sort of control over what was happening to me.

Chemotherapy makes Bearing sick. It made me sick too. Chemotherapy lands Bearing in hospital isolation. It landed me there too. Cancer scares Bearing. It scared me too.

Sometimes, cancer -- the return of cancer -- still scares me. But mostly, I am happy to be alive, happy to be watching movies that authentically capture the reality of cancer, movies that make me proud to have overcome what Bearing's doctor calls an insidious disease.

John Diamond was a British journalist who died from tongue cancer in 2001. He wrote a book called Because Cowards Get Cancer Too: A Hypochondriac Confronts his Nemesis.

This book is different than your normal cancer read. I say that because of John Diamond's wit and intelligence when writing about his cancer experience. His sarcasm when it came to things like people telling him that he was brave was right on. He didn't think he was brave for going through cancer treatments, he thought that it was his only choice, something he had to do. This book is a realistic look at things that were going on around him and within him. John, you and I are definitely on the same page!

I have already read this book twice and when I find it I'm going to read it again.