A Tale of Two Transplants

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Can cancer be funny? Even if it's that childhood scourge of leukemia? Even if it comes around twice? To the same kid? If you think it impossible to find humor in such macabre circumstances, S. Donald Webb's memoir of his experiences dealing with his son's leukemia diagnoses and bone marrow transplants (eight years apart) might change your mind. In A Tale of Two Transplants, Webb details with piquant irony his frustrations with the medical-industrial complex that seems to exist for nothing more than itself. He explains how having a kid with cancer is like living in a fishbowl under the relentlessly-critiquing eye of friend and foe alike. He sardonically catalogs his unsuccessful struggle to find some point to all the pain the disease and its treatments inflict on his son and the family. He explains how his kid's cancer diagnoses matures him, as the process of enduring the two transplants causes the scales to fall from his eyes regarding all the institutions-medicine, family, church, country-in which he once fervently believed, allowing him to see them all for what they are for the very first time. Webb informs while he entertains. You'll come away knowing more about leukemia, the immune system, the meaning (or not) of life, a smattering of philosophies and theologies for helping make sense of things that inevitably don't, how and why the health care delivery system botches things at least as often as it gets them right, and why family members treat each other far worse than they'd ever dream of treating a stranger off the street (because they can). Along the way, you'll be charmed with Webb's laconic, easy-going manner of story-telling, always to the point but never in a rush to get there. By the time you reach the end of the book, you'll marvel at how funny cancer can be. Webb turns a tale of tragedy to one of dispassionate amusement, in the process spinning cancer into, if not comic gold, then certainly something not as dismal as