Carrie Host

Few of us are well-versed in what it takes to save our own lives. Carrie Host is.

Between Me and the River is a heartbreaking, glorious, and poetic rendering that spans several years of a young woman’s life during which her body is ravaged by a slow-growing but deadly form of cancer. It is also the story of a woman saved by her inner resources, and the buoying love of her husband and three children. In Between Me and the River, Host intimately describes her battles and triumphs in nail-biting detail. While difficult to read at times, Host’s cut to the quick candor keeps the reader engaged as she takes us on a journey into the labyrinth of the medical system, as she rebuilds her body, brick by metaphorical brick, only to have it ravaged again.

Her lyrical descriptions provide a reprieve from the harsh realities of a life forever on the “river” – a metaphor that she uses for her cancer. At once poet and realist, Host’s struggle to make peace with her disease provides a compelling narrative that propels the reader to turn the book’s pages with care, hanging on to Host’s voice as though it’s a life raft through the unknown rapid waters she so bravely navigates, even when it appears she will drown. Yet, through it all, one has the feeling she’s got her eyes set on the horizon, far enough in the distance to see herself across the river.

Sometimes the river is torrid. Sometimes it stops moving completely. Emboldened with a fighting spirit even as her 5’7′ body drops from a healthy 135 to a haunting 97 pounds, rendering her unable to hold her head up let alone hold a new baby, the future looks bleak. But treatment after treatment, she fights and holds on, wrestling with her own spirituality and drawing epiphanies about herself and her relationships – the sort that come from the deepest depths of despair – that bless her with an uncommon peace that only those who have visited death’s door can intimately understand.

Host navigates the river as she enters into complicated dialogues with friends, her children, and her husband, all of whom, at times, she believes she may never see again. She describes the desperation and frustration she feels when hiring someone to care for her children, to do the things she is supposed to be doing as she feels herself falling into a shadow of her former self when cancer seems to be winning.

This is a story that shakes the reader to the core, one not for the faint of heart, but certainly a worthy one. Host, caught in the middle of a glorious life, could have been any one of us… yet, she is no longer like us. She is different, as only a woman can be when she has touched death’s door and returned with as many scars as gifts.

This book teaches us powerful lessons about love, letting go, and forgiveness, about the quest for health and the fight to survive, about savoring every small moment with the same enthusiasm and appreciation as all the grand moments put together. In the end, it is Host’s determination and wisdom that bring her back fighting. Hers is a voice not easily forgotten, one that makes a reader wish her many more healthy years, for surely she has many more gifts to share with us.… (mais)

Carrie Host wasn't even forty and her youngest child was still a baby when she got the news that would change her whole family's life. She had carcinoid tumors throughout her abdomen and on her lungs. And this particular type of rare cancer doesn't respond well to radiation or chemotherapy. Her odds of survival were quite low but she wasn't going to give up without a fight. This memoir is her tale of the terrible journey that cancer took her on, the treatments she underwent, and the toll it took not only on her but on her family as well. It is the powerful story of an awful ordeal. An emotional tale, as you would expect the memoir of a woman ravaged by cancer and taken to the brink and back, there are also moments of humor interspersed with the bleakness. And the emotional insights that Host offers are honest, revealing, and probably quite helpful both for families and for individuals facing a cancer diagnosis.

Host pulls no punches in detailing the ravages that her body experienced. She confronts the heartbreak of her baby not knowing who she was after one extended stretch of time at the Mayo Clinic. And she is candid about the effect her cancer diagnosis had on her friendships, watching some friends drift away right when she needed normalcy the most. She was incredibly lucky in her family relationships and in her financial situation as both of these enabled her to search for the best, most cutting edge treatment and afforded her the time to pursue it.

In the book, Host has chosen the extended metaphor of cancer as a river, alternately raging to pull her under, deceptively calm, or quietly flowing along. Initially this extended metaphor worked but it eventually became intrusive and overly used without a hint of subtlety. In her initial chapters, she hadn't quite settled on the metaphor she wanted to use and used many different ones, which caused a small bit annoyance on my part as this should have been cleaned up in the editing process. Once she settled into her narrative and focused on the narrative itself, her story became more compelling and moving. It didn't really need the current of the river to carry the reader along. And as a registered grump, I have to mention that the grammatically incorrect title drives me batty. A totally personal reaction, I'm sure, but one I cannot help nor one which I can ignore. An emotional read, this needed tighter editing and excising but was ultimately a fine read.… (mais)

I think this memoir is going to stay with me for a long time. Both the story and the writing itself are amazing.

Throughout the book, Host very effectively uses the river as a metaphor for her battle against a rare, incurable form of cancer. By using something to which I could relate, the river, her writing created word-pictures that drew me into her feelings of being suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into the icy-cold water when her body turned against her. She also made me feel her numbing fatigue akin to fighting a strong current, her worry about what would happen to her new baby and other friends and family if she went under, and her desperate hope for a medical lifeline. But it wasn't all about her.

Host also made me feel like I knew her extremely supportive husband, her strong sisters, the loving mother who would trade places with her if she could, and the friends who didn't abandon her. Any person in crisis would be blessed to have such a support system.

The unrelenting punishment cancer meted out to Host's body makes this a sad book, but her bravery and determination to endure and become strong again makes it an inspiring book.… (mais)